Alphabet reported significantly higher revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 on the back of increased mobile and YouTube video advertising.
Revenue in the last three months of the year jumped 22 percent from a year earlier, reaching $26.1 billion, while net income rose 8 percent to $5.3 billion.
“2016 was simply a great year for us,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google, in a conference call with analysts.
The vast majority of the quarter’s revenue, $22.4 billion, came from Google’s advertising business, with $3.4 billion coming from other business segments such as hardware sales, the Google Play Store and Google’s Cloud services.
Google’s so-called « other bets, » the fancy and fantastical projects such as self-driving cars, Google Fiber and internet from drones, contributed $262 million, up 75 percent.
