Alphabet Inc - Class A
Google Inc. (Google) is a global technology company. The Company's business is primarily focused around key areas, such as search, advertising, operating systems and platforms, enterprise and hardware products. The Company generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising. The Company also generates revenues from Motorola by selling hardware products. The Company provides its products and services in more than 100 languages and in more than 50 countries, regions, and territories. Effective May 16, 2014, Google Inc acquired Quest Visual Inc. Effective May 20, 2014, Google Inc acquired Enterproid Inc, doing business as Divide. In June 2014, Google Inc acquired mDialog Corp. Effective June 25, 2014, Google Inc acquired Appurify Inc, a San Francisco-based developer of mobile bugging application software.
Net income compounded at 25.2% annually over 6 years.
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43.9% undervaluedAlphabet Inc - Class A (GOOGL) — Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript
AI Call Summary AI-generated
The 30-second take
Alphabet had a very strong quarter as advertising spending bounced back sharply after a pandemic-related slowdown. The company is also investing heavily to grow its cloud computing business, which it sees as a huge future opportunity. This matters because it shows Google's core business is recovering while it builds new areas for growth.
Key numbers mentioned
- Total Alphabet revenues were $183 billion for 2020.
- Consolidated revenues were $56.9 billion for the fourth quarter, up 23%.
- YouTube advertising revenues were $6.9 billion, up 46%.
- Google Cloud revenues were $3.8 billion for the fourth quarter, up 47%.
- Operating cash flow was $22.7 billion for the quarter.
- Cash and marketable securities were $137 billion at quarter end.
What management is worried about
- The ongoing uncertainty in the external environment led to maintained spending discipline.
- Travel continues to get hit pretty hard by the pandemic's effects.
- Expectations are changing for how data is used online, and people are demanding greater privacy, impacting third-party cookies.
- Year-over-year quarterly comparisons will be affected meaningfully by the impact of COVID last year.
What management is excited about
- Consumers continued to move more of their activity online, and advertisers responded by reactivating spend.
- Google Cloud's backlog, which is nearly all attributable to Cloud, nearly tripled from 2019 to 2020.
- YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds than all linear TV networks combined.
- Over 500,000 channels livestreamed on YouTube for the first time in 2020.
- Videos in our new Shorts player are receiving 3.5 billion daily views.
Analyst questions that hit hardest
- Eric Sheridan (UBS) - Cloud investment and YouTube monetization: Management gave a broad, strategic answer on Cloud investment and highlighted YouTube's growth in Direct Response advertising without providing specific forward-looking monetization paths.
- Doug Anmuth (JPMorgan) - Cloud margins and backlog: The response focused on long-term contracts and scale benefits over time, avoiding a direct comparison to peers' margin structures.
- Heath Terry (Goldman Sachs) - Drivers of ad acceleration: The answer was qualitative, describing a broad-based reengagement of advertisers rather than quantifying new versus returning spend.
The quote that matters
We are pleased with Google Services revenue of $52.9 billion in the fourth quarter, which continued the significant rebound.
Philipp Schindler — CBO
Sentiment vs. last quarter
Omit this section as no previous quarter context was provided.
Original transcript
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alphabet's Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. With us today are Sundar Pichai, Philipp Schindler, and Ruth Porat. Now I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance, including the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on those areas, may be considered forward-looking. Such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. Additional information will also be set forth in our upcoming Form 10-K filing for the year ended December 31, 2020.
Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. 2020 was a year unlike any other. We are proud that people continue to choose Google's products to stay informed, connected, and comforted during uncertain times. Being helpful to people in moments big and small is the foundation of everything we do. The past year also accelerated the shift to cloud and adoption of online services. This has profound implications for all companies and consumers, and we are pleased that so many trust us to help them make this transition. In particular, Google's products and support have been a lifeline for millions of small and medium businesses hit hard by the pandemic. Today, I'll review some of the important work we have done this quarter across Google and Alphabet with a particular focus on our growing cloud business, which we are breaking out as a separate segment for the first time. Then I'll welcome to the call Google's Chief Business Officer, Philipp Schindler, who many of you know from investor conferences and events. Philipp will speak about partnerships, business, and advertising trends in the Google Services segment. We have heard that you’d appreciate more texture and detail there. Then Ruth will go through the quarter in more detail. First, some highlights at Google. Since the pandemic began, our teams have built new features and products to help people and businesses. Now we are helping with the complex challenge of getting vaccines to billions of people around the world. Vaccination locations have started to roll out in Google Search and Maps. Google Cloud's Intelligent Vaccine Impact platform is helping authorities improve vaccine distribution and forecasting. We are providing substantial new ad grants to the CDC, the World Health Organization, and others to promote vaccine education. We're also making direct grants to organizations addressing racial and geographic disparities in vaccination access, plus opening up Google's facilities as vaccination clinics as needed. Elsewhere, in Maps, we added a new community feed in the Explore tab, and now you can track takeout and delivery orders when you book or order from Google Maps. At YouTube, we are building products to help creators benefit from two important trends: live video and short-form video. More than 500,000 channels livestreamed on YouTube for the first time in 2020, from artists performing in their living rooms to churches moving their services online. And videos in our new Shorts player are receiving 3.5 billion daily views. We are looking forward to expanding Shorts to more countries this year.
Thanks, Sundar, and good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be joining you today. We're pleased with Google Services revenue of $52.9 billion in the fourth quarter, which continued the significant rebound from the negative impact of COVID earlier in the year. Two trends drove the strong results across Search, YouTube, and network advertising. Consumers continued to move more of their activity online, and advertisers responded to the shift in consumer behavior by reactivating spend that they had paused earlier in the crisis.
Thank you, Philipp. We are very pleased with our exceptional fourth quarter performance after an unprecedented year. For 2020, total Alphabet revenues were $183 billion, up 13% year-on-year or up 14% in constant currency. With our new segment disclosures this quarter, I'll start with quarterly results at the Alphabet level, followed by segment results and conclude with our outlook. My focus will be on year-on-year comparisons for the fourth quarter unless I state otherwise. For the fourth quarter, our consolidated revenues were $56.9 billion, up 23%, which reflect broad-based increases in advertiser spending in Search and YouTube within Google Services as well as ongoing strength in Google Cloud. Our total cost of revenues was $26.1 billion, up 24%, primarily driven by other costs of revenues, which was $15.6 billion and up 25%. The biggest factors here were: first, content acquisition costs, primarily driven by costs for YouTube's advertising-supported content, followed by costs for subscription content; and second, costs associated with data centers and other operations, including depreciation. Operating expenses were $15.2 billion, down 4%. The year-on-year decline reflects the lapping of valuation-based compensation charges in certain Other Bets in the fourth quarter of 2019, primarily in R&D, as well as the impact of actions taken earlier in the year as a result of COVID. Each of the three components of OpEx also reflects our decision to slow headcount growth beginning late in the first quarter. Headcount was up 3,180 from the third quarter. Again, the majority of new hires were engineers and product managers with continued aggressive investment in cloud for both technical and sales roles. Operating income was $15.7 billion, up 69%, and our operating margin in the quarter was 28%. Other income and expense was $3 billion, which primarily reflects unrealized gains in the value of investments in equity securities. Net income was $15.2 billion. Operating cash flow was $22.7 billion, with free cash flow of $17.2 billion in the quarter and $43 billion for the full year 2020. We ended the fourth quarter with $137 billion in cash and marketable securities. Let me now turn to our segment financial results, starting with our Google Services segment. Total Google Services revenues were $52.9 billion, up 22%. Each component of our advertising revenues reflects the return of advertiser spend in response to the continued movement of consumer activity online that Philipp spoke about, including Google Search and other advertising revenues of $31.9 billion in the quarter, up 17%; YouTube advertising revenues of $6.9 billion, up 46%, driven by a rebound not only in brand advertising but also ongoing strength in direct response; network advertising revenues of $7.4 billion, up 23%. Other revenues were $6.7 billion, up 27%, primarily driven by growth in YouTube nonadvertising and Play revenues. Within Play, app revenues in the fourth quarter continued to benefit from elevated levels of engagement, reflecting increases in active buyers and spend per buyer due to COVID. However, we did experience a deceleration in growth from the levels we saw in the third quarter. Google Services operating income was $19.1 billion, up 41%, and the operating margin was 36%. Turning to the Google Cloud segment, including GCP and Google Workspace. Revenues were $3.8 billion for the fourth quarter, up 47%. GCP's revenue growth rate was again meaningfully above Cloud overall. Strong growth in Google Workspace revenues was driven by growth in both seats and average revenue per seat. Google Cloud had an operating loss of $1.2 billion, essentially flat versus last year. As to our Other Bets, for the full year 2020, revenues were $657 million, primarily generated by Fiber and Verily, and reflect that most of our Other Bets are pre-revenue. The operating loss was $4.5 billion for the full year 2020 versus an operating loss of $4.8 billion in 2019. Let me end with our outlook for each segment and our investments more broadly. For Google Services, we're encouraged by the increase in consumer online activity and the return of advertiser spend as reflected in our Q4 results. Looking forward to 2021, year-over-year quarterly comparisons will be affected meaningfully by the impact of COVID last year with easier comps in the first half, especially in Q2, and then lapping stronger performance in the second half. With respect to other revenues, with the closing of the Fitbit acquisition earlier this month, we will be reporting its revenues within Google Other. In terms of investment levels within Google Services, late in the first quarter of 2020, as a result of COVID, we made what we described as tactical adjustments to slow the pace of spend in certain categories. Given the ongoing uncertainty in the external environment, we maintained the discipline through the rest of 2020. Looking forward, we do expect the pace of investment to increase to support the extraordinary opportunities we see given the usefulness of our products and services in this environment. The investment pace will ramp up over the course of the year. As for Google Cloud, we've obviously been investing aggressively given the substantial market opportunity we see. Under Thomas Kurian's leadership, we further accelerated investment to strengthen the position of the business. For example, we are on track to meet our near-term goal of tripling the size of the Cloud Direct sales force and have greatly expanded the partner channel. We've also substantially improved our product offerings while rationalizing our approach to focus on our six key industry verticals. And we've invested in expanding our network of locations for compute capacity to support Cloud, ending 2020 serving customers in 24 regions and 73 zones. We're encouraged by the momentum in the growth of revenue and customer wins. We more than doubled revenues over the last two years from $5.8 billion in 2018 to $13.1 billion in 2020. Our backlog, which is nearly all attributable to Cloud, nearly tripled from 2019 to 2020. Although increases in backlog do not directly correlate to revenue trends, the growth in backlog demonstrates the success Google Cloud is having with large enterprises, which are signing meaningful long-term commitment agreements. Looking forward, we will continue to focus on revenue growth driven by ongoing investment in products and the go-to-market organization. Cloud's operating loss reflects that we have meaningfully built out our organization ahead of revenues, as we've discussed in prior quarters, with respect to the substantial investments in our go-to-market organization as well as engineering and technical infrastructure. Operating loss and operating margin will benefit from increased scale over time. In addition, we are focused on delivering on efficiency efforts across the board to contribute incrementally to profitability over time. Finally, as you can see from the historical data provided in the press release, Cloud's operating loss was higher in the first quarter relative to other quarters, and then the operating loss improves thereafter. We expect similar seasonality in 2021. In terms of Other Bets, we continue to invest with a focus on the long-term value creation opportunity. On headcount, we plan to reaccelerate the pace of hiring in Google Services, in line with our opportunities. Our headcount growth will also reflect the addition of Fitbit and our ongoing transition of certain customer support roles from third-party vendors to Google's in-house operation centers. We also plan to continue to prioritize investment in both sales and technical roles for Google Cloud. Turning to CapEx. At the consolidated level, the year-on-year results this quarter again reflect the slower pace throughout 2020 of investment in office facilities. Within technical infrastructure, servers continue to be the largest driver of investment in the fourth quarter, followed by data centers. Looking ahead, we expect a return to a more normalized pace of ground-up construction and fit-out of office facilities, which translates into a sizable increase in CapEx in 2021. Servers will continue to be the largest driver of spending on technical infrastructure. Finally, a housekeeping point. As noted in our earnings press release, we have adjusted the estimated useful lives of servers and certain network equipment starting in 2021. We expect these changes will favorably impact our 2021 operating results by approximately $2.1 billion for assets as of year-end 2020. We look forward to the year ahead. I hope everyone stays safe. Thank you. And now Sundar, Philipp, and I will take your questions.
And our first question comes from Eric Sheridan from UBS.
I hope everyone is safe and well on the team out there as well. Maybe I'll try first on Cloud. I don't know if it's better to Sundar or to Ruth, but can you just conceptually help us understand how to think about the opportunity versus Cloud and how it factors back into which you want to invest against the opportunity or, possibly, maybe even accelerate the opportunity by looking at inorganic paths to growing scale vis-à-vis competition in the space? And then maybe for Philipp if I can. YouTube continues to evolve as a platform. There's now subscription offerings. You highlighted the strength you're seeing in DR. Could you talk a little bit about the path for monetization in the coming years and how we should think about the opportunity against a large-scale audience and engagement you see at YouTube broadly?
On Cloud, obviously, we see how early customers are in the shift. We see the large TAM ahead and definitely, the market dynamics. And our momentum in the context of the market is what is the framework which we are thinking about, the scale of investments and the pace of investments. Obviously, it's an area in which the longer you are in, the cohorts add up and so contributes more and the economies of scale starts working as well. But we are definitely investing ahead to make sure we can serve the customers globally across all the offerings they are interested in, and that's how we are thinking about it. Ruth, I'm not sure you want to add more.
I think that's the main point, just given the sheer scale of the opportunity and our position, investing to really position ourselves well across industries and geographies. And the key elements of it, I tried to call out in the opening comments: investing in product, go to market, data centers. And you can see it in the results. I think you're going to continue to see us building there, and that's what we're talking about building ahead. We are keenly focused on delivering for both customers and shareholders, and that, of course, includes an intense focus on the path to profitability.
Yes. Regarding YouTube and its development, our Direct Response business on YouTube was almost non-existent three years ago, and it has now become one of our largest and fastest-growing advertising options. With TrueView for action, we are enabling advertisers to more easily reach audiences through video campaigns. To share some statistics, 60% of TrueView for action customers are new to YouTube, and in the first half of 2020, we more than doubled the number of active advertisers using this feature. We are capitalizing on the significant commercial activity on the platform, with 70% of YouTube viewers stating they purchased a brand after seeing it on YouTube. I previously mentioned L'Oréal, and MasterClass is another great example. The online learning sector has become a substantial opportunity, and they have used TrueView for action to link the right audience to relevant content, resulting in significant increases in clicks to their websites and course sign-ups. We believe YouTube is exceptional for brand advertisers as well. Our brand business experienced a tough time early in the pandemic but rebounded in the third and fourth quarters. YouTube allows advertisers to connect with younger audiences, reaching more 18- to 49-year-olds than all linear TV networks combined. Watch time is on the rise, and advertiser effectiveness continues to improve. This reflects positively on our subscription strategy. On the topic of music, it is a highly popular vertical on YouTube and an integral part of the overall experience. We discovered that users desired a premium YouTube experience, including the ability to download songs and videos. YouTube Premium offers additional revenue channels for music labels and publishers. In 2019, YouTube paid the music industry over $3 billion, and we currently have over 30 million music and premium subscribers, operating in more than 95 countries, providing members with numerous extra benefits.
And our next question comes from Doug Anmuth from JPMorgan.
Ruth and Sundar, I just wanted to follow up on Eric's question a bit. Anything else you can add just in terms of the significant inflection that you saw on Google Cloud backlog there? And I guess, in particular, curious what you're seeing in terms of the benefit and success as you're leveraging Alphabet more broadly like in the Ford deal. And then how do you think about Google Cloud margins structurally kind of long-term relative to peers? Any color there would be helpful.
I would like to start by mentioning that customers seeking digital transformation are showing a strong interest in a comprehensive solution set that Google and Alphabet can offer, depending on their industry. We observe this trend in healthcare through our initiatives in Google Health and our work in Verily, all of which contribute positively. Ford exemplifies a long-term vision that extends beyond Cloud to integrating Android into their vehicles, showcasing significant transformations across the company. One area where we excel is in leveraging our global business operations led by Philipp, collaborating closely with Thomas' teams, which creates notable synergies. In response to your second question about the broader aspects, as I mentioned earlier, we engage in long-term contracts. Over time, incorporating additional cohorts can enhance our margin structure. The scale of our product offerings, the variety of sectors, and the multiple regions we serve involve substantial investment. There is a fixed cost structure associated with this, and we are also making proactive investments. However, as we expand our business, we anticipate favorable trends in performance.
And our next question comes from Brent Thill from Jefferies.
You mentioned that there was an increase in brand spending during the quarter. Many investors are curious about the sustainability of this trend and what you are observing as you move into the start of the year. It would be helpful if you could discuss how your clients are behaving as they come out of the holiday season.
Sure. I'll take that. As we've each noted, the financial results really did reflect this increase in advertiser activity. That was in part unlocking budgets that they had paused earlier in the year as well as really reflecting the increase in consumer online activity. The largest contributor, as Philipp mentioned, was retail, the largest contributor to the year-on-year growth of the ads business. But I would say tech, media, and entertainment as well as CPG were also meaningful contributors. For Search, we saw ongoing improvement in advertisers' spend broadly. For YouTube, Direct Response, as Philipp talked about, really did maintain a very high level of growth. The acceleration in overall YouTube revenue growth reflects a pickup in brand advertising across all verticals on top of the ongoing strength that we saw in DR. Then in network, also the same point; it's this pickup in advertiser spend, as Philipp noted. It was led by growth in AdMob and Ad Manager. So we're really pleased with Q4. It was a great end to a challenging year. When we think about 2021, I made the point in the opening comments, we obviously have easier year-on-year comparisons in the first half as we anniversary the effects of the pandemic. So not much more to add; it was a strong quarter, and we feel really good about the level of activity.
And our next question comes from Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs.
Great. I appreciate the level of detail on the drivers behind the acceleration in Search and YouTube. I was wondering if you could go a bit further and disaggregate or give, even just qualitatively, the drivers behind that acceleration between pre-pandemic advertisers returning to prior spending levels versus new advertisers or new advertiser spend being allocated to the platform.
Well, I think the main point is sort of this mega comment that we saw a slowdown. As Philipp said, and we've talked about on prior calls, one of the first things that happens is a step-back, and then you see, as users reengage and activity picks up and the effectiveness of advertising, the ROI available, you see advertising come back in. I remember talking about this throughout last year that we had seen this actually going back to the prior financial crisis. What you've seen is just a broad-based reengagement, which we're really pleased about across industries. It's also – as Philipp noted in his comments, there's been a tremendous opportunity really to step in here and help small, medium businesses as they were evolving and adapting to this new digital world, and it’s been quite key there as well.
Our next question comes from Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley.
I have two for Philipp. Philipp, first one, I appreciate all the color on retail and commerce, the merchant community growing strong in the last year. I'd be curious to hear about your discussions now with merchants and sort of what the largest friction points that they're looking for you to solve and sort of continue to help them as the world reopens, kind of the merchant discussions. And then secondly, a question on one of the earlier products on Discover feed; I'd love to hear about sort of early learnings on Discover feed and how you think about hurdles you need to overcome to monetize that.
Yes. Thank you very much for the question. Look, at the highest level, we want to build a healthier e-commerce ecosystem. When people come to Google to shop, we want them to help find the best product with the best prices from really the widest range of merchants, and we want our results to be as comprehensive and relevant as possible. We took some significant steps last year, as you know, on Google Shopping. In many ways, we really see them as a return to our first principles here: free listing, zero commissions, really good feedback, helping to lower barriers for online retail. We’ve become a great place for stores to connect with potential customers, whether it's by driving traffic to the website for free listings or ads or just by making it easier for purchases to happen directly on Google. By the way, let me be clear also, shopping ads will continue to be a powerful way for retailers to promote their products, obviously. So overall, we're providing an open ecosystem that works for every kind of business, from national chains and online marketplaces to just your small local stores. We're giving retailers more choice, which is very well received by opening our platform to third-party providers. We talked about this, starting with PayPal and Shopify. We've brought YouTube into the fold, and we began experimenting with a feature that lets you learn a lot more about products and videos on a limited set of channels and so on. Overall, it's very, very well received. Discover has grown dramatically since we launched it, I think just three years ago. People are loving how we're surfacing relevant information, gorgeous visuals that are all in what we call a Coriolis feed experience. Naturally, some of these experiences are commercial. We've made discovery ads generally available about six months ago. I think it was May 2020. It's already reaching up to 3 billion people across Discover, YouTube, and Gmail, and that's worldwide. Advertisers love how we're able to drive performance objectives by really matching their premium creatives with Google intent on our Coriolis surfaces.
And our next question comes from Colin Sebastian from Baird.
Maybe for Sundar or Philipp, a follow-up on YouTube. Just given the strength of those services ads and subscriptions during the pandemic, I wonder if part of what we're seeing is more of an acceleration from TV ad budgets from linear spending to more of YouTube spending, I mean given also the momentum we've seen in over-the-top over the last nine months or so. And then given some of the changing industry dynamics around privacy, including what you've already announced around browser cookies, wondering what plans might be as well for Android and how we should think about potential impact on ad revenues broadly as a result of privacy changes.
Yes, I can take that. We've seen brands steadily shift budgets to YouTube to complement their linear TV buys as TV audiences really become more fragmented. As traditional TV ratings continue to decline, TV advertisers are turning to streaming platforms like YouTube to reach people who are no longer watching TV. Connected TVs are our fastest-growing screen. In the U.S., we have over 100 million people that watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their TV screens each month. YouTube helps advertisers reach general audiences they can't reach anywhere else. We talked about it; YouTube reaches more 18 to 49-year-olds than all linear TV networks combined. There’s a big opportunity for YouTube to help brands and agencies really more easily connect with this audience. We are very invested in this space. In the second half of last year, we launched YouTube Masthead on TV screens to help advertisers drive awareness with large audiences in basically a single moment. Many are taking advantage of it: Uber, many others. We launched Brand Lift for YouTube on TV screens to help advertisers make informed decisions about ad performance, optimize streaming campaigns in real time and so on. We also made it possible last year for advertisers to basically buy among the most popular YouTube and YouTube TV content viewed on the TV screens in one single lineup. Regarding the third-party cookies strategy in general, we know that expectations are changing for how data is used online, and people are demanding greater privacy. We're taking our responsibility to user privacy and to supporting our partners in the web ecosystem very, very seriously. In 2019, we announced The Privacy Sandbox, which is an open standards initiative to invent new technology that will replace third-party cookies with a set of privacy-preserving mechanisms for the web, and we're making great progress. We've shared a detailed proposal with the industry for experimentation and feedback. We shared recently as well our FLoC, our Federated Learning of Cohorts API, which we think provides an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies. We really believe Privacy Sandbox is the best path forward, and we remain very committed to our collaboration with the ads community on privacy-preserving open standard mechanisms that can sustain a healthy and ad-supported web.
And our next question comes from Michael Nathanson from MoffettNathanson.
Philipp, I was following up on Colin's question. I wanted to understand the framework and think about the bigger long-term opportunity and priorities. The focus is on streaming video, right? Are you satisfied with the progress of YouTube TV so far? Will you expand into other countries? Can you compare that with the opportunity you see in connected TVs and devices as you've done for Google TV or Chromecast? Is there perceived added value from advertisers for this type of inventory? Does it attract a new type of advertiser for YouTube TV inventory or connected TV inventory compared to traditional YouTube advertising?
Yes, maybe I'll comment on one of the things which has worked well for Google over the years is we really try to reach users where they are, and that's how Google has worked always. We've invested across platforms, across devices, and across countries. I think the same applies for the YouTube experience. We want to bring it to the screen that's most convenient for users and hence, our investments in Google TV, Chromecast, YouTube TV as a whole itself. I think we are taking a long-term view here, obviously focused on the user experience and really getting it all to work well. While smartphones are at the center for YouTube, TV is an important form factor. Over time, people will use it across multiple screens, and so that's the experience we are focused on. Whenever we create that experience, we know, over time, there is value to be captured commercially that makes sense for advertisers, but we take a long-term view.
Yes. I talked about the connected TV part already. Maybe briefly just on YouTube TV, YouTube TV continues to gain momentum. Our advertising efforts on YouTube TV itself are still very, very early. But we think there is an opportunity to apply some of our targeting and measurement capabilities to really provide a better user and advertiser experience over time. Yes, we've heard from customers; they have a very strong interest in advertising and streaming environments. I mentioned how we combine it in the single lineups. So that's an interesting path going forward.
And our next question comes from Stephen Ju from Crédit Suisse.
So Sundar, I think you've recently talked about a 10- to 20-year journey for AI and quantum computing to unlock new use cases. I think you brought up in the past some of the ways AI is helping you with the products that you have in market right now. But as we take a more longer-term look into the future, what do you think some of the new applications could be? And I think, Philipp, it might have been a few years ago when you were speaking at an investor conference, and you called out the desire to onboard and help SMBs, particularly as they really had no way to advertise before. Google, and online in general, presented a golden opportunity to really help them grow their business. So where do you think you are in terms of putting together an easy-to-use set of tools to help those who otherwise don't have agency representation so that they can reach all the different customers that they should be reaching across all of the different services that you're offering?
Thank you, Stephen. I'll start with the AI part. We've always aimed to be foundational in our approach to technological advancements, and that's a key strength for us. We invest significantly across the company and are among the largest R&D investors globally. AI is a major focus for us. I'm particularly excited about our progress over the past few years in understanding various modalities, such as text, images, voice, and vision. We believe we are at a pivotal moment, and we are investing to create better models and enhance our understanding in a more universal way. This advancement will impact all of our products. You saw an example of this when we implemented BERT in Search, which significantly improved quality. You'll see similar advancements across Google Search, YouTube, Android, and our investments in Alphabet, including self-driving cars and robotics. We are committed to driving leading-edge progress in these areas.
Yes. First, let me recognize that it has obviously been a very, very challenging environment for SMBs. Many weren't online, and many lost line of sight to demand overnight due to COVID. Around this time last year, as soon as we saw the scale of the impact, we really accelerated product that gives our customers, and especially our SMB customers, signals to help them navigate and pivot. As I noted earlier, as more consumers moved online and advertisers obviously responded by reactivating spend, we also saw our advertiser base grow, particularly the number of smaller advertisers or SMBs, and we're helping them see a shift in supply and demand not just across sectors but actually within sectors. For example, travel continues to get hit pretty hard. After the initial lockdown last year, searches for vacation homes and near-me rentals saw huge spikes, and that continues to fluctuate. On the other hand, if we look at retail, demand isn't disappearing; it's shifting in many cases. We're seeing increases in searches for things like gym equipment, crafts, patio heaters, and so on, anything related to outdoor activity. We're obviously thinking about how to help SMBs on products like Maps. In the last five years, we've made more than 1,000 improvements to business profiles, making it a lot easier for merchants to connect with customers, especially now into the crisis. In 2020, we added new features to provide COVID updates, service changes, and new attributes like takeout, delivery, curbside pickup, now all easily available for consumers on Maps to connect them to their favorite SMBs, so a really incredible investment from our side, and I think it's very well received.
Thank you. And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Jim Friedland for any closing remarks. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you again on our first quarter 2021 call. Thank you, and have a good evening.
Operator
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.