So Google stock closed above $1,000 a share this week. Every finance blog and half of Twitter is acting like this is some kind of milestone worth throwing confetti over, and I get why: round numbers are catnip for headline writers, but I want to push back on it a little, because the whole framing bugs me.
Here's what actually happened, if you missed it: Google reported Q3 earnings Thursday after the bell, revenue around $14.9 billion, earnings per share of $10.74 against estimates closer to $10.36, and the stock jumped something like 13% in a single day. That's the real story. Beating earnings estimates by that much, on that much revenue, is genuinely impressive. Android's everywhere now, the ad business is still printing money even as the industry keeps predicting its doom, and they're doing it without a Windows-style stranglehold on any platform. That's worth writing about.
But "the stock hit $1,000" isn't a fact about the company. Its a fact about how many shares exist. Google hasn't split its stock since 2005 (a 2-for-1 back then), so the share price has just been allowed to climb and climb while other companies split theirs every time the number gets big enough to look scary on a ticker. Apple did a split years ago. If Google had split 4-for-1 at some point in the last few years the stock would be sitting around $250 right now and nobody would be writing think pieces about it. Market cap is what matters, Google's is somewhere north of $335 billion depending on the hour you check, and market cap doesn't care what the per-share number looks like. A company worth the same amount split ten different ways would have ten different "milestone" headlines to hit.
I say this as someone who does not own Google stock, for the record, so I've got no dog in this fight either way. I just find the whole genre of financial journalism a little exhausting. CNBC had a chyron literally counting up toward $1,000 like it was a rocket launch. It's a number. Companies choose their share count somewhat arbitrarily and then business media treats the resulting price as if it's a scoreboard.
What I actually think is more interesting buried in that earnings report: mobile is dragging down average cost-per-click again, which Google's been dealing with for a couple years now as people search more from their phones and click ads less than they do on a desktop browser. That's the real trend to watch, not the ticker symbol. Advertisers pay less for a mobile click than a desktop one, and as more of Google's traffic shifts to phones, that number matters a lot more to the actual business than whatever the stock price says on a given Thursday.
Unrelated small complaint while I'm here: I spent twenty minutes this afternoon trying to find the actual 10-Q instead of somebody's summary of somebody's summary of it, and every single link I found was some blog quoting another blog quoting a press release. Nobody links primary sources anymore. Investor relations pages exist! Use them! I eventually found the numbers on Google's own IR site, which took about ninety seconds once I stopped trusting search results and just typed the URL myself.
Anyway. None of this changes anything for people actually using Google's products day to day. You're not paying $1,000 more for Gmail this morning. It's a story about traders and index funds and headline writers who like round numbers, not really a story about Google as a company doing anything different than it was doing last Tuesday. The earnings were good. That part's real. The rest is a party built around an arbitrary decimal point.
I'll take the actual product news over stock milestones any day, feels like there's more of that coming soon anyway, if the rumors about an Apple event next week pan out. More on that whenever it actually happens instead of when someone's guessing about it.