Google shares, buoyed by strong ad traffic, soar above $1,000
Google saw its shares hit $1007.40 on Friday morning – a record for the Mountain View company.
A Google logo is seen at the entrance to the company's offices in Toronto in this file photo taken Sept. 5, 2013. Google said this week that consolidated revenue rose to $14.89 billion in the third quarter of 2013.
Reuters
Google stock has topped a grand a share for the first time.
Boosted by stronger-than-expected third quarter revenue of $14.98 billion – and a jump in mobile advertising – shares in Google shot up to $1,007.40 on Friday morning. (As of writing, share prices are hovering closer to $1002.) The surge was widely attributed to the number of paid clicks on Google's various platforms, which Google said was up 25 percent from the same time last year.
Over at the BBC, Rory Cellan-Jones notes that at the time of Google's IPO, in 2004, "early skepticism about the search giant's real value was quickly dissipated, as investors marvelled at the fast growing earnings from its advertising formula. Then, from 2007 the shares halved in value as doubts surfaced about whether the growth story could continue. But, over the last four years, as Google has shown that it can be as big a force in mobile advertising as it has been on the desktop, confidence returned sending the shares ever higher."
To that end, Google is seeing a leap in mobile traffic at YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for approximately $1.65 billion in stock. In an earnings call yesterday (hat tip PC World), Google said that mobile YouTube use made up a full 40 percent of its traffic, compared to just six percent in 2011.
In related news, after passing the 900 million activation mark last month, Google announced it had hit 1 billion Android activations. At the same time, Google said that the next iteration of the Android operating system would be named not after a jelly bean or a cupcake, but the Kit Kit bar. Current Internet scuttlebutt has Kit Kat arriving later this month.