A YouTube logo seen at the YouTube Space LA in Playa Del Rey, Los Angeles, California, United States October 21, 2015.
Lucy Nicholson | Reuters
The online advertising market continues to suffer, as heavyweights Alphabet and Microsoft reported disappointing sales during their most recent quarters.
YouTube advertising revenue dropped 2% year over year to $7.07 billion during the Google parent’s third quarter, missing analysts’ estimates of $7.42 billion. It was the first time YouTube’s ad revenue shrank on a year-over-year basis since the company started breaking out the division’s results in 2019.
Alphabet’s overall revenue growth drastically declined from 41% a year ago to 6%, underscoring how fears of a looming recession have caused companies to cut back on their advertising and marketing campaigns. Indeed, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said during a call with analysts that YouTube’s revenue decline “primarily reflects further pullbacks in advertiser spends.”
Some of the advertisers that slowed their online advertising spending with Alphabet come from the financial services, insurance, loans and mortgage and crypto industries, said Alphabet chief business officer Philipp Schindler.
Last week, Snap set the tone for the online advertising market when it missed third-quarter analyst estimates with $1.13 billion in sales, sending its shares tumbling more than over 30% the next day. Snap attributed its poor sales to companies “decreasing their marketing budgets” in response to the weak economy, the company said in a letter to investors.
Microsoft also reported a slowdown in its online advertising business.
Its search and news advertising business (including Bing and Microsoft News) reported sales growth of 16% in the September quarter, the first of its fiscal year, far below the 40% revenue growth it reported a year earlier. Indeed, the growth rate of that business has been shrinking each quarter of the past year, coinciding with the general downward trajectory of the entire online advertising market.
Additionally, Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s quarterly sales growth shrank to 17%, down from 42% during the same period in 2021.
Microsoft CFO Amy Hood told analysts during an earning calls that that “reductions in customer advertising spend, which also weakened later in the quarter, impacted search in advertising and LinkedIn marketing solutions.”
Meanwhile, Meta on Wednesday is expected to report its second-straight quarter of declining sales, underscoring the current turmoil in online advertising. Judging from the recent earnings reports of various tech giants, it’s unlikely the Facebook parent is going to report any signs that the online advertising market is set for a rebound.
Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.
People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.
As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.
Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.
JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.
“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.
The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle issued quarterly results on Monday that trailed analysts’ estimates, but the company offered bullish comments on its cloud infrastructure segment.
Here is how Oracle did compared to LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.49 expected
Revenue: $14.13 billion vs. $14.39 billion expected
Revenue increased 6% from $13.3 billion in the same period last year. Net income rose 22% to $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, from $2.4 billion, or 85 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue in Oracle’s cloud services business jumped 10% from a year earlier to $11.01 billion, accounting for 78% of total sales.
The company’s cloud infrastructure segment, which helps businesses move workloads out of their own data centers, has been booming due to demand for computing power that can support artificial intelligence projects. Oracle said revenue in its cloud infrastructure unit increased 49% from a year earlier to $2.7 billion.
“We are on schedule to double our data center capacity this calendar year,” Oracle Chair Larry Ellison said in a release. “Customer demand is at record levels.”
In January, President Donald Trump announced plans to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. in collaboration with Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank. The first initiative of the joint venture, called Stargate, will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said during the announcement at the White House.
Oracle’s cloud and on-premises licenses business contributed $1.1 billion in revenue during the quarter, down 10% year over year.
Oracle also said it is increasing its quarterly dividend to 50 cents a share from 40 cents.
As of Monday’s close, the stock is down almost 11% year to date.
Oracle will hold its quarterly call with investors and will share its outlook at 5 p.m. ET.