Because FB is killing it with its Marketplace and because for a lot of people FB has become synonymous with the Internet. I’ve become an outlier among my circle of acquaintances because I still google the name of a specific restaurant or coffee shop we intend to go to, while my friends go directly on FB and search for the restaurant’s name in there (or even on IG to look at the restaurant’s most recent stories to see what its holidays open hours are).
Hence why the google spokesperson or whatever her official position is mentioned something about their revenues being negatively affected by currency fluctuations, that is usually double-speak for “we did bad in foreign markets”, which is to say that the US market is not the only market that counts.
Also, more time spent by people on FB Marketplace (no matter if they make money on it or not) means less time spent on Google’s web properties. I would also look at the age demographics, Google the brand was seen as cool by me and my age-cohort back when we were in our early 20s, so that most of us still use it 15 years later as we approach our 40s. But I suspect that the Facebook and especially the Instagram brand mean a lot more to people under-30 compared to what Google means.
Google the company had seen this coming by late 2010 at least, that is that FB (or whatever social network will become dominant) will become synonymous with the Internet, much as Google was back then. That’s why they resorted to desperately-sounding battle cries involving the number of arrows and the volume of wood material in order to convince their workers that they need to build a product that would not let FB become the only player in town. Unfortunately their Google+ execution was poor and here they are now, looking from the outside at a walled-garden.
I don’t know if that double speak conclusion makes much sense. If they were doing bad in foreign markets and the share of revenue there was negligible, currency fluctuations would have no impact.
Actually, it’s the inverse, where currency fluctuations only start to have an effect when you have significant foreign revenue
> Actually, it’s the inverse, where currency fluctuations only start to have an effect when you have significant foreign revenue
I do think Google has had a "have significant foreign revenue" for quite some time now, otherwise they wouldn't have reached almost a $1 trillion market valuation, it's a strange thing though that only now they've started putting the blame on "currency fluctuations", a move which is usually made by non-cool businesses like retailers or copper-miners (to name just a few), not by Amazon and Google (at least not until now).
Maybe I'm just a little bit too cynical when it comes to how business is done nowadays, but in the case of those retailers and copper-miners I just mentioned blaming "currency fluctuations" it's just a way of not acknowledging to their investors that "hey, we didn't do our homework in terms of execution oversees, but let's blame it all on FX, it's not like even the central bankers know how this currency thing even works". Like I said, maybe I'm just cynical, but I see Google playing the same defect-the-blame game, especially as the Google representative repeatedly refused to come with any other details about this (presumably by the next conference call she'll be surprised to hear that FX hedging is actually a thing that most of the time works quite well).
