George Reyes on revenue growth

George Reyes, Google’s chief financial officer, said at a Merrill Lynch Internet Advertising conference in New York:

“We had a revenue force initiative, a team of bright engineers, who were tweaking the ad system and that paid off pretty nicely, since then we have got so good and so efficient that most of what’s left is just organic growth, which means you have to grow your traffic and your monetisation, so I think now our growth rates are slowing and you see that each and every quarter and we are going to have to find other ways to monetise the business.”

Then later when asked to amplify….

GR: “We are getting to the point where the law of large numbers starts to take root, we ended the year doing $6bn in revenue, which is nothing to shake a stick at, but at the end of the day, growth will slow. will it be precipitous? I doubt it, are there more things we can do to improve revenue performance? - probably, so I’m not turning bearish at all, I think we have got a lot of growth ahead of us - the question is…at what rates?”

Question: So were you talking about something you’ve seen in the quarter or just about the law of large numbers?

GR: “The law of large numbers.”