• by Laurie Sullivan , February 2, 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to power Google’s ability to support brands through insights, new tools and automation. It is one factor that drove up revenue for the year, Sundar Pichai, Alphabet and Google CEO, said during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday.

Pichai called out several AI models that are helping to create conversational experiences. The latest -- Pathways -- was released in October. One model can be trained to do thousands or millions of things.

“From MUM to Pathways to BERT and more, these deep AI investments are helping us lead in search quality,” he said.

Then there’s the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that improved searches for vaccine information. And soon, Google will introduce new ways to search with images and words simultaneously.

Alphabet’s strong quarter and year end reported on Tuesday saw advertising revenue rise 32% to about $75 billion in Q4 2021. Consumers searched for apparel and hobbyist items, while retail, finance, entertainment and travel advertisers raised marketing budgets, Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said during the earnings call.

Revenue from Google Services for the quarter rose 31% to $69.4 billion.

Google Search and other advertising revenue rose 36% to $43.3 billion, with strength in retail. YouTube advertising revenue rose 25% to $8.6 billion, reflecting strength in direct response and brand advertising.

Network advertising revenue rose 26% to $9.3 billion, driven by AdMob. Other revenue rose 22% to $8.2 billion, driven primarily by growth in hardware, which benefited from the successful launch of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro as well as the addition of Fitbit revenues followed by YouTube non-advertising revenue.

Revenue from Google Cloud rose 45% to $5.5 billion in the fourth quarter, but had an operating loss of $890 million.

For Other Bets for the full year 2021, revenues were $753 million. The operating loss was $5.3 billion for the full year 2021 versus an operating loss of $4.5 billion in 2020.

YouTube Shorts drove significant engagement during the quarter. The company just hit 5 trillion all-time views, with more than 15 billion views each day globally.

Last year, the number of YouTube channels that made at least $10,000 revenue was up more than 40% year-over-year. More creators are earning money from non-ads products like Super Chat and channel memberships.

Google also announced that its board of directors had approved a 20-for-one stock split in the form of a one-time special stock dividend on each share of the company's class A, class B, and class C stock. The stock split must still obtain approval from the company's shareholders.

If approved, each stockholder as of the close of business on July 1, 2022 will receive a dividend of 19 additional shares after the close of business on July 15, 2022.