Welcome everyone. Thank you for standing by for the Elphabet first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session you will need to press star one on your telephone.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Jim Friedland, director of investor relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Elphabet's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With us today are Sundar Pachai, Philip Schindler and Ruth Perrat.
Now I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations and financial performance may be considered forward looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent form 10K filed with the SEC. During this call we will present both GAP and non-GAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAP to GAP measures is included in today's earnings press release which is distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website located at ABC.XYZ forward slash investor. Our comments will be on year over year comparisons unless we state otherwise and now I'll turn the call over to Sundar.
Thank you Jim and good afternoon everyone. I'm pleased with our business performance in the first quarter with search performing well and momentum in cloud. We introduced important product updates anchored in deep computer science and AI. Our not-star is providing the most helpful answers for our users and we see huge opportunities ahead, continuing our long track record of innovation. On cloud we continue to be on a long and exciting journey to build that business. Cloud delivered profitability this quarter and we remain focused on long term value creation here.
Today I'll give an update on the two themes I spoke about last quarter. One are advancements in the AI and how they are driving opportunities in search and beyond. And two are efforts to sharpen our focus as a company. Then I'll talk about our momentum in cloud and close with our progress at YouTube.
First the incredible AI opportunity for consumers or partners and for our business. I've compared it to the successful transition we made from desktop to mobile computing over a decade ago. Our investments and breakthroughs in AI over the last decade have positioned us well in our last call I outlined three areas of opportunity. Continuing to develop state of the art large language models and make significant improvements across our products to be more helpful to our users. Empowering developers creators and partners with our tools. And enabling organizations of all sizes to utilize and benefit from our AI advances. We have made good progress across all three areas.
In March we introduced our experimental conversational AI service called BOR. We have since added our palm model to make it even more powerful and BORD can now help people with programming and software development tasks including core generation lots more to come. For developers we have released our Palm API alongside our new maker suite tool. It provides a simple way to access our large language models and begin building new generative AI applications quickly. A number of organizations are using our generative AI large language models across Google Cloud platform, Google workspace and our cyber security offerings.
For years we have been focused on making search even more helpful from Google lens to multi-searched to visual exploration and search immersive view and maps, Google translate to all the language models powering search today. We have used AI to open up access to knowledge in powerful ways. We will continue to incorporate generative AI advances to make search better in a thoughtful and deliberate way. We will be guided by data and years of experience about what people want and our high standards for quality. And we will test and iterate as we go because we know that billions of people trust Google to provide the right information.
As it evolves we will unlock entirely new experiences in search and beyond just as camera voice and translation technologies have all opened entirely new categories of queries and exploration. AI has also been foundational to our ads business for over a decade. Products like Performance Max use the full power of Google's AI to help advertisers find untapped and incremental conversion opportunities. And as we continue to bring AI to our products our AI principles and the highest standards of information integrity remain at the core of all our work.
As one example our perspective API helps to identify and reduce the amount of toxic text that language models train on with significant benefits for information quality. We are trying to help ensure the safety of generative AI applications before they are released to the public. We are proud to have world-class research teams who have been advancing the breakthroughs underpinning this new era of AI. Last week I announced that we are bringing together the brain team in Google research and deep mine into one unit. Combining all this talent into one focus team backed by the pool computational resources of Google will help accelerate our progress and develop the most capable AI systems safely and responsibly.
On to my second team the company shop and focus. I spoke last quarter about our commitment to invest responsibly and with discipline and to find areas where we can operate more cost-effectively and with greater velocity. We have significant multi-year efforts underway to create savings such as improving machine utilization and finding more scalable and efficient ways to train and serve machine learning models. We are making our data centers more efficient, redistributing workloads and equipment where servers are being fully used. This is important work as we continue to significantly invest in infrastructure to drive our many AI opportunities. Improving external procurement is another area where data such as significant savings and this work is underway. And we are taking concrete steps to manage our real estate portfolio to ensure it meets our current and future needs. We'll continue to use data to determine additional areas for durable savings.
Next Google Cloud and please do the ongoing momentum in cloud. Our discipline expansion of our product road map and go-to-market organization has helped to build one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. We have consistently grown top line revenues and improved annual operating margins and we continue to do so this quarter. Our growth has come from our deep relationships with large enterprises, a strong partner ecosystem under our product leadership.
Over the past three years, GCP's annual deal volume has grown nearly 500 percent, with large deals over 250 million growing more than 300 percent. Nearly 60 percent of the world's 1000 largest companies are Google Cloud customers and many leading startups and millions of small and medium enterprises use Google Cloud. We have also built a strong partner ecosystem. Over the last four years, the number of Google Cloud partners certified practitioners around the world has increased more than 15 times. The largest global system integrators have built 13 dedicated practices with Google Cloud compared to zero when we started. And today more than 100,000 companies are part of our Google Cloud partner advantage program.
Our growth is also driven by our product leadership. We are bringing our generative AI advances to our cloud customers across our cloud portfolio. Our palm generative AI models and vertex AI platform are helping behave ox to identify inside a threats. Ox body cut to test its autonomous vehicles and light tricks to quickly develop text image features. In workspace, our new generative AI features are making content creation and collaboration even easier for customers like standard industries and left. This builds on our popular AI part workspace tools smart canvas and translation hub used by more than 9 million paying customers.
我们的增长也受到产品领导力的推动。我们正在将我们的生成式人工智能进步应用于我们的云端产品组合,为云客户带来更多的价值。我们的掌纹生成式人工智能模型和 Vertex AI 平台正在帮助 Ox(一家公司)识别内部威胁,Ox 也在利用这些模型来测试其自主驾驶车辆,轻松开发图像特征等等。在 Workspace(一个产品)中,我们的新生成式人工智能功能让像 Standard Industries 和 Left 这样的客户更轻松地创建和协作内容。这是基于我们颇受欢迎的 AI 部分 Workspace 工具,如智能画布和翻译中心,目前已有超过 9 百万付费客户在使用。
Our product leadership also extends to data and altix which provides customers the ability to consolidate their data and understand it better using AI. New advances in our data cloud enable altabuty to scale new digital and omnichannel experiences while focusing on customer loyalty. Shopify to bring better search results and personalization using AI and Mercedes Benz to bring new products to market more quickly. We have introduced generative AI to identify and prioritize cyber threats, automate security workflows and response and help scale cybersecurity teams. Our cloud cybersecurity products help protect over 30,000 companies including innovative brands like Broadcom and Europe's telepaths.
We are successfully integrating mandate with our products including mandate and threat intelligence and breach analytics. Our open approach to AI development coupled with our industry leading TPUs and best in class GPUs from Nvidia enable innovative companies to tackle any AI workload with speed and flexibility. AI 21 labs, replete mid-journey and many others build and train foundation models and generative AI platforms. We are the only cloud provider to announce availability of Nvidia's new L4 Tensor Core GPU with the launch of our G2 VMs which are purpose-built for large inference AI workloads such as generative AI.
Turning next to YouTube, let me start by thanking Susan Wajiski for her terrific leadership of YouTube for nine years. She recently transitioned into an advisory role with alphabet discordr with Neil Mohan, a long-time leader at Google and YouTube becoming the new head of YouTube.
Here are a few highlights from the quarter. YouTube Shots continues to see strong momentum with creators. Last year, the number of channels that uploaded to Shots daily grew over 80%. Those posting weekly on Shots saw the majority of new channel subscribers coming from their Shots posts. The living room remained our fastest growing screen in 2022 in terms of watch time and we are seeing growth and momentum internationally.
On our subscription business, we rolled out several new updates to YouTube Premium. Premium subscribers can now queue videos on phones and tablets, stream continuously while switching between devices, and auto download recommended videos for offline viewing. And we have great momentum around YouTube TV and YouTube Prime Time channels. We have announced pricing for the NFL Sunday ticket offering which will help to drive subscriptions, bring new viewers to YouTube's paid and ad supported experiences, and create new opportunities for creators.
在我们的订阅业务中,我们为YouTube Premium推出了几个新的更新。高级订阅用户现在可以在手机和平板电脑上排队观看视频,切换设备时可以连续流式传输,并自动下载推荐视频以便离线观看。此外,我们在YouTube电视和YouTube Prime Time频道方面具有强大的势头。我们已经公布了NFL Sunday Ticket的定价,这将有助于推动订阅,为YouTube的付费和广告支持体验带来新观众,并为创作者创造新机会。
To close across the company, we are excited about helping people, businesses and society reach their full potential with AI. We'll share updates at Google IOW about how we are using AI across our products, including our pixel devices, and share some exciting new developments for Android. Thanks to our employees around the world who continue to work hard to advance our mission. After nearly 25 years, the work to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful is as urgent as ever and I look forward to the work ahead.
Over to you, Philip. Thanks, Ondar, and hey everyone. It's great to be here today. I'll kick off with Google services performance in the first quarter, then provide color into our key opportunity areas, and then turn it over to Ruth for more and our financial performance.
Google services revenue of 62 billion were up 1% year and year, including the effect of a modest foreign exchange headwind. In Google advertising search and other, revenue screwed 2% year-to-year, reflecting an increase in the travel and retail verticals, offset partially by decline in finance as well as in media and entertainment. In YouTube ads, we saw signs of stabilization and performance while in network, there was an incremental pullback and advertisers spend. Google other revenues were up 9% year-to-year, led by strong growth in YouTube subscriptions revenues.
Now let's double click into the three areas I laid out last quarter, where we see clear opportunities for long-term growth and advertising. Number 1, Google AI. Number 2, retail, which cuts across all of our ads products and services. And number 3, YouTube.
First, Google AI. I've said before, AI has long been an important driver of our business. Advancements are powering our ability to help businesses speak and small, respond in real time to rapidly changing market and consumer shifts and deliver measurable ROI when it's needed most. In Q1, we continue to innovate across our products.
Take core search, for example. In targeting, we updated search keyword relevance using the latest natural language AI from mom models to improve the relevance and performance of shown ads when there are multiple overlapping keywords eligible for an auction. In bidding, we improved our smart bidding models to bid more accurately based on differences in search ad formats. In other words, bid more effectively depending on how a user wants to engage with an ad. In creatives, we opened our automatically created assets beta to all advertisers in English. ACA generates text assets alongside your responsive search ads and uses AI to help reduce the amount of manual work to keep creative fresh and relevant to user's query, context, and to the advertiser's business.
To then unlock core search further and maximize conversions across all of Google, we're actively helping more advertisers pair it together with performance max. Advertises we use pmax are on average, achieving over 18% more conversions at a similar CPA. This is up five points in just 14 months thanks to advances in the AI underlying bidding, creatives, search query matching, and new formats like YouTube shorts. I mentioned earlier that travel was a contributor to growth. In March, we launched pmax for travel goals. Now, even the smallest totalities can benefit from the expanded reach of hotel ads and pmax. Like family run, Croatia Hotels Group, who drove a 32% increase in revenue and a 26% increase in total direct bookings within just one month of using pmax for travel goals. There's more to come here as we had even more AI pod features. Stay tuned for more at Google Marketing Live in May.
Moving on to retail, where we had a solid quarter. Our focus is on three pillars. Number one, making Google a core part of shopping journeys for consumers and a valuable place for merchants to connect with users. Number two, empowering more merchants to participate in our free listings and ads experiences. And number three, driving retail performance further with great ads products.
In a macro environment of do more with less tools and solutions are proving that we can deliver value for retailers online and omni channel and drive high value customers, even in challenging times. Caraway, a direct to consumer maker of cookware, used target row as to uncap budgets and pmax to optimize and deploy spend across Google inventory for its q4 Black Friday campaign. Pmax drove a 46% increase in revenue and 31% jump in row as leading to car ways best business day in history and the robust reinvestment in its AI first strategy for q1. For omni focused retailers, we recently rolled out store sales reporting and bidding and performance max for store goals. This is helping retailers go beyond just optimizing to online conversions to also optimize to their stores reaching and bidding for high value customers were more likely to spend in store. Danish department store magazine recently used our store sale solution to boost its omni channel row as 128% versus online only campaigns. Thanks to dynamic in store values coming from its first party data, including its high value customers, magazine can now with confidence measure the full impact of its online investments on both e-commerce and physical store revenue.
Turning to YouTube creators fuel YouTube success across long firm and shorts music and podcasts vertical and horizontal YouTube is where creators are incentivized to make the best work. Which means the best content more viewers and more opportunities for advertisers. As I said last quarter our creator ecosystem and multi format strategy will be key drivers of YouTube's long term growth and to support this growth we're focused on number one shorts number two engagement on ctv number three investing in our subscription offerings and number four longer term effort to make YouTube more shoppable first shorts.
We're seeing strong watch time growth monetization is also progressing nicely people are engaging and converting on ads across shorts at increasing rates. Number two connected to be asunder said we're seeing momentum globally viewers love watching YouTube creators and the favorite content on the large screen advertisers are leaning in. Zooming out more broadly for a second across YouTube we're helping brands benefit from our expensive reach and drive the profitability they're looking for. In one of our largest marketing mix modeling studies to date YouTube R.I. is 40% higher than linear TV and 34% higher than all other online video according to a custom analysis from January 2020 to March 2022 of Nielsen Compos R.I. benchmarks across 16 countries and 19 billion of total media spend measured. This proves YouTube's ability to drive effectiveness at scale.
Next up our subscription offerings. The goal is to be one stop shop for multiple types of video content across both ad supported and premium services. Our launch of multi view on YouTube TV and our first of its kind all our card access for NFL Sunday ticket are two examples of how we're investing here expect more updates over the coming quarters. Number four shopping on YouTube it's still super early days one highlight last year we brought shopping to more creators and brands by partnering with commerce platforms like Shopify. Now more than 100,000 creators artists and brands have connected their own stores to the YouTube channels to sell their products. We're excited about the potential ahead.
A close with an awesome example of where bringing the best across Google to our partners to accelerate innovation Mercedes Benz. In February we announced a first of a kind partnership to bring Google Maps platform and YouTube into future Mercedes Benz vehicles equipped with its next gen MBOS operating system. Beyond enabling the luxury automaker to design a customized navigation interface will also provide AI and data cloud capabilities to advance their autonomous driving efforts and create an enhanced customer experience.
On that note a big thank you first to our customers and partners for the trust and collaboration and second to our Googlers for all of their incredible work this quarter. Ruth over to you.
Thank you, Philip. Our financial results for the first quarter reflect continued healthy fundamental growth in search and momentum in cloud. As I go through the discussion today I will reference some changes to our reporting and disclosures that are covered more fully in the 8K we filed last week. I will conclude with our outlook for the first quarter are consolidated revenues were 69.8 billion up 3% or up 6% in constant currency. Search remain the largest contributor to revenue growth on a constant currency basis.
In terms of expenses and profitability year on year comparisons are impacted by 3 factors. First the 2.6 billion in charges we took in the first quarter related to workforce and office space reductions. We provided a table in our earnings release that shows the impact of those charges on cost of revenues and operating expenses. Second the adjustment we made to the estimated useful lives of servers and certain network equipment at the beginning of 2023. As you can see in our earnings release the effect for the first quarter was a reduction in depreciation expense of $988 million. Third the shift in timing of our annual employee stock based compensation awards from January to March delays the step up in SPC from Q1 to Q2. This shift in timing does not affect the total amount of SPC over the full year 2023.
Total cost of revenues was 30.6 billion up 3% driven by other cost of revenues of 18.9 billion which was up 7%. The biggest factor of which was compensation costs associated with data centers and other operations and followed by content acquisition costs. Operating expenses were 21.8 billion up 19% with a significant impact from the charges related to workforce and office space reductions. Operating income was 17.4 billion down 13% and our operating margin was 25%. Net income was 15.1 billion. We delivered free cash flow of 17.2 billion in the first quarter and 62 billion for the trailing 12 months. We ended the quarter with 115 billion in cash and marketable securities.
Turning to our segment results these were affected by two additional changes outlined in our 8K filing. First, reflecting the increasing collaboration between deep-mind and Google services, Google Cloud and other bets. As of Q1, deep-mind is reported as part of Alphabet's unallocated corporate costs. And second, beginning in the first quarter, we updated our cost allocation methodologies to provide our business leaders with increased transparency for decision making. In our filing, we provided a recast of prior period results for the segment for these two changes. The highlights of the year on your performance of our segments that I will review reflect these recast results.
Starting with Google services, revenues were 62 billion up 1%. Google search and other advertising revenues of 40.4 billion in the quarter were up 2%. YouTube advertising revenues of 6.7 billion were down 3%. Network advertising revenues of 7.5 billion were down 8%. Other revenues were 7.4 billion up 9%. Reflecting primarily ongoing significant subscriber growth in YouTube TV and YouTube Music Premium. TAC was 11.7 billion down 2%, primarily reflecting a mix shift between search and network. Google services operating income was 21.7 billion down 1% and the operating margin was 35%.
从谷歌服务开始,收入为62亿美元,增长1%。该季度谷歌搜索和其他广告收入为404亿美元,增长2%。YouTube广告收入为67亿美元,下降3%。网络广告收入为75亿美元,下降8%。其他收入为74亿美元,增长9%。这主要反映了YouTube TV和YouTube Music Premium的持续重大用户增长。TAC为117亿美元,下降2%,主要反映了搜索和网络之间的混合变化。谷歌服务营业利润为217亿美元,下降1%,营业利润率为35%。
Turning to the Google Cloud segment, revenues were 7.5 billion for the quarter up 28%. Growth in GCP remained strong across geographies, industries, and products. Google workspaces strong results were driven by increases in both seats and average revenue per seat. Google Cloud had operating income of 191 million and the operating margin was 2.6%.
As to our other bets for the first quarter revenues were 288 million and the operating loss was 1.2 billion.
关于我们在第一季度的其他投资,收入为2.88亿美元,而运营亏损为12亿美元。
Turning to our outlook for the business, in terms of the operating environment, our results in the first quarter reflected ongoing headwinds due to a challenging economic environment and the outlook remains uncertain. Foreign exchange headwinds have moderated and we expect less of a foreign exchange headwind in the second quarter based on current spot rates. With respect to Google services, within advertising, Q1 results reflect the resilience of search with its unique ability to surface demand and deliver measurable ROI. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange, the revenue growth of search was similar to last quarter. In YouTube, we saw signs of stabilization in ad spend on a sequential basis. We continued to prioritize growth in shorts engagement where we are encouraged by progress and monetization.
As to other revenues, in YouTube subscriptions, we are pleased with the significant ongoing subscriber growth in both YouTube music premium and YouTube TV.
In play, revenues were down year on year, primarily due to the continued impact of foreign exchange in APAC, although results have improved as we lapped the impact from our introduction of fee reductions last year.
Turning to Google Cloud, our investments in product innovation, our go-to-market organization, and our partner ecosystem, delivered strong results as customers across industries and geographies increasingly rely on Google Cloud to digitally transform their businesses. That being said, in Q1, we continued to see slower growth of consumption as customers optimized GCP costs reflecting the macro backdrop, which remains uncertain.
In terms of operating performance, we remain focused on driving long-term profitable growth in cloud while continuing to invest given the substantial opportunity.
就运营表现而言,我们仍然专注于在云服务领域实现长期盈利增长,并在机遇巨大的情况下继续投资。
Moving to other bets, in the first quarter, we similarly work to refine strategies and prioritize efforts across the portfolio, including reductions to headcount.
在涉及其他投注时,我们在第一季度同样努力完善策略和优先分配资源,包括减少人员编制。
I will now walk you through an update on our efforts to re-engineer our cost base, slowing the pace of operating expense growth, while creating capacity for key investment areas, particularly in supportive AI across the company.
First, as discussed on the fourth quarter call, we have efforts underway in three broad categories. Number one, using AI and automation to improve productivity across alphabet for operational tasks, as well as the efficiency of our technical infrastructure. Number two, managing our spend with suppliers and vendors more effectively. And number three, continuing to optimize how and where we work.
Second, with respect to headcount growth. The reported number of employees at the end of the first quarter includes almost all of the employees impacted by the workforce reduction we announced in January. We expect most of the impacted individuals will no longer be reflected in our headcount by the end of the second quarter. In terms of the outlook for headcount for the year, as we shared last quarter, we are meaningfully slowing the pace of hiring in 2023, while still investing in priority areas, particularly for top engineering and technical talent.
In terms of our investments in AI, we are excited about the creation of Google DeepMind, combining the brain team from Google Research with DeepMind, with the goal to accelerate innovation and impact. Beginning in the second quarter of 2023, the costs associated with teams and activities transferred from Google Research will move from Google Services to Google DeepMind within Alphabet's unallocated corporate costs.
Finally, as it relates to CAPEX, for 2023, we now expect total CAPEX to be modestly higher than in 2022. As discussed last quarter, CAPEX this year will include a meaningful increase in technical infrastructure versus a decline in office facilities. We expect the pace of investment in both data center construction and servers to step up in the second quarter and continue to increase throughout the year.
Thank you. Sundar, Philip, and I will now take your questions. Thank you.
谢谢。现在,Sundar、Philip和我将回答你们的问题。谢谢。
As a reminder to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Background noise, we ask that you please mute your line once your question has been stated.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two.
太好了。感谢您回答我的问题。我有两个问题。
First one for Sundar. Sundar, as you think over the course of the next 12 months, we have a lot of new AI tools to show us. What new behavior changes or capabilities are you most excited about for users, developers, and advertisers as these tools come out?
Then the second one for Ruth, could you talk to us about how much of the AI tools have you incorporated internally to drive more productivity out of your engineers, your sales force, your G&A, or is that something to come over the next couple of years?
Obviously in search, we have been using AI for a while. It is what has really helped lead search and search quality for the past few years using other lamps. We now have a chance to more natively use the lamps.
I think the main way, and by the way, as I said in my remarks, we are going to be deliberate. We are not going to start us getting it right for users, so we will iterate and innovate as we have always done.
The main area I am excited about is we do know from experience that users come back to search. They follow on, they are engaging back on stuff they already did. For us to use the lamps in a way we can serve those use cases better. I think it is a real opportunity.
If it is YouTube, the chance to really improve experiences for creators and consumers in terms of how the videos are viewed, it is a try. We have already changed the process of rolling out. It is an area where I think we will see the biggest advances because productivity is a strong use case in which generative AI can help.
Obviously, on cloud, this has been an important moment as pretty much every organization is thinking about how to use AI to drive transformation. So across the board, from startups to large companies, they are engaging with us. So I viewed as a point of infection there as well.
As I noted, we have a number of efficiency efforts underway and one of them is about using AI and automation to further improve productivity across alphabet. That being said, we already have AI and a lot of what we do, for example, in the way we operate and run the finance organization. It is helpful in a lot of the analytics that we use.
One of the exciting things for us is the opportunity to share that with cloud customers. Some are just noted what we are doing within Google Workspace. We obviously all live on Google Workspace. That is another example of how we benefit internally from the productivity from AI. This is also something that is available for users and enterprise customers more broadly.
Finally, one of the areas that we have talked about is the opportunity with our compute capacity and all that we have done there and the infrastructure innovation, which again is helpful internally for what we do, but on behalf of our customers. Great. Thank you both.
Thanks for taking the questions. One for Sundar and then one for Ruth. Sundar, just as you think about integrating Bard and your search product over time, can you just talk more about what percentage of search queries you think would utilize large language model type responses and how should we think about the costs of running search on these models relative to today.
And then Ruth, I was just hoping you could follow up on your comment on CAPEX. If you could help us understand the modest step up in CAPEX relative to three months ago. Thank you.
Thanks, Doug. You know, obviously we have launched Bard as a complimentary product to search, but we will be bringing, you know, LLM experiences more natively into search as well. I do think, you know, first of all, on we'll be rolling it out in a incremental way so that we can test it, trade and innovate. So I think we'll approach it that way.
I think overall, you know, I think it can apply to a broad range of queries. So I think I'm excited that it can allow us to better help users in a category of queries, maybe in which there was no right answer and they're more creative, et cetera. So I think those are opportunities. But even in our existing query categories, where we get a chance to do some heavy lifting for the users and use AI to better give guide and guide them, you know, I think you will see us exploring in those directions as well. It's early days, but I think there's a lot of innovation to come.
On the cost side, you know, we've always, you know, costs of computers always been a consideration for us. And if anything, I think it's something we've developed extensive experience over many, many years. And so for us, it's a nature of habit to constantly drive efficiencies in hardware, software, and models across our fleet.
And so this is not new. If anything, you know, the sharper the technology curve is, we get excited by it, because I think we build world class capabilities in taking that and then driving down cost sequentially and then deploying it at scale across the world. So I think, I think, you know, we'll we'll take all that into account in terms of how we drive innovation here and but I'm comfortable with how we approach it.
And in terms of catbacks, we do now expect that total catbacks for the year for 2023 will be modestly higher than in 2022 and tried to point out that we're expecting a step up in the second quarter and that will continue to increase throughout the year. And you know, as we discussed last quarter, AI is a key component and underlies everything that we do and we're continuing to invest in support of AI, support of our users, advertisers, and our cloud customers. So we're commenting on here.
And then as we talked about last quarter, the increase in catbacks for the full year 2023 reflects the sizeable increase in technical infrastructure investment. And on the flip side, a decline in office facilities relative to last year. Thank you both. Thank you.
The next question comes from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Thank you so much for taking the questions and hope everyone on the team as well. Maybe two if I could first on cloud.
Obviously one of the dominant themes you touched upon is this client optimization theme that's going on broadly and cloud computing. Can you give us a little bit more of your perspective on where we are in terms of the optimization theme broadly and cloud computing as a headwind, either revenue growth or backlog growth compared to the tailwinds of broader long term consumption growth and possibly the contribution of AI initiatives to cloud computing growth. And then second on YouTube, obviously you've seen a lot of success with respect to engagement and consumption on shorts.
Can you give us an update on where we are on monetization trends and shorts compared to the consumption you've already seen in usage ships. Thank you so much.
请问能否给我们更新一下我们在货币化趋势和短视频方面的情况,与您已经看到的使用情况相比呢?非常感谢。
So in terms of the cloud cloud question, you know, the point we're trying to underscore is there's uncertainty in the economic environment. And so we saw some headwind from slower growth of consumption with customers really looking to optimize their costs given that macro climate. Leave the forecasting to you on that, but you know, both Sundar and I commented on really pleased with the momentum that the team has been delivering in the breadth of what they've been working on. I do think you know, I would add that, you know, we're leaning into optimization and there's an important moment to help our customers and we take a long term view. And so it's definitely an area we're leaning in and trying to help customers, you know, make progress in the efficiencies where we can fill it.
Yes, on the short side, look, short stewardship is growing rapidly. We announced 50 billion plus daily views on the Q4 earnings call up from 30 billion last spring. We're pleased with our continuing progress and monetization, as I said earlier, people are engaging and converting on ads across shorts at increasing rates, closing the gap between shorts and long form is a top priority for us as is continuing to build a greater creator and user experience. Ads on shorts are now available via video action app discovery and performance max campaigns and via product feeds. Shorts are also shoppable. Again, we're the only destination where creators can produce all forms of content across multiple formats and screens with multiple ways to make a living.
And as Sundar said last year, the number of channels that uploaded to shorts daily grow over 80% and then in February, we brought revenue sharing to shorts via YouTube partner program. Our sustainable revenue sharing model at scale remains pretty unique in the industry and we continue to see strong creator adoption. So ultimately, our goal is to make YouTube the best plates for shorts, yours and creators. And that's really what we're focused on right now. Thank you.
Sundar, you came up in the group that structured a lot of the Android partnerships from inception. And I believe possibly the iOS agreement as well. So how do you feel about alphabet's ability to maintain the unit economics with these partnerships in light of Microsoft's ambitions to increase the share of paid search. And the root of this, have any impact on your outlook for profitability of overall alphabet over the long term. Thank you.
Maybe I'll look at the these dynamics are have always been around. It's important to remember, you know, as far as I can remember, we've always been in a competitive environment for these deals. And while I can comment on the specifics of any of our partnership agreements, what is served as well is always first of all building the best product possible focused on giving value to users. And when we work with our partners, we work hard to, you know, create a win win, win win experience and ultimately partners end up choosing us because that's what their users want. And you know, it's always been what's helped help search be widely distributed. So I think it all starts with continuing to innovate and improve search and making sure we are leading leading there. So I think we always approach it, you know, very robustly over the many, many years and I'm comfortable that will continue to be able to do so.
And then in terms of just longer term profitability, I think I brought an out your question somewhat because the way we're looking at it is we continue to be committed to investing for growth and we want to ensure we have overall capacity for growth. And so we have a number of work streams underway to as we keep describing it, durably reengineer our cost space. And in particular, what we're excited about are long term opportunities with AI and want to make sure we have the capacity to continue to invest there in the other areas where we see long term growth and search and ads cloud YouTube hardware. And so that underscores our efforts to build in additional flexibility. And as we have said repeatedly, we want to ensure that expense growth is not growing at a revenue growth. And that means driving revenue growth and really being as, as disciplined as we can on the market. And as disciplined as we can on these various work streams that we've discussed earlier in this call in last quarter as well to improve our expense growth trajectory.
Thank you. The next question will come from Justin Post of BAML. Please go ahead.
谢谢。接下来的问题将来源于BAML的贾斯汀·波斯特。请开始提问。
Great. Thanks. Maybe one for send our one for Ruth. Sorry, you got the cost question on learning language models into search. Can you talk about revenues? On one hand, you'll see better relevancy and maybe better results with higher conversion. But on the other hand, there might be fewer areas for ads or fewer queries because people get answers quickly more quickly. Are you optimistic on that transition and maybe give us your thoughts there? And then Ruth, back in after one time charges, it looks like op-ex growth is now 8%. So real progress there. Could you give us a flavor of where you are you think in your optimization cycle?
Thank you. So, first of all, throughout the years, as we have gone through many, many shifts in search and as we have all searched, I think we've always had a strong grounded approach in terms of how we evolve ads as well. And we do that in a way that makes sense and provide value to users. And the fundamental drivers here are people are looking for relevant information and in commercial categories, they find ads to be highly relevant and valuable. And so that's what drives this virtual cycle. And I don't think the underpinnings of the fact that users want relevant commercial information, they want choice and what they look at even in areas where we are summarizing and answering, etc. Right users want choice. We care about sending traffic, advertisers want to reach users. And so all those dynamics, I think, which have long served as well remain. And as I said, we'll be, we'll be iterating and testing as we go. And I feel comfortable, we'll be able to drive innovation here like we've always done.
And in terms of our op-x trajectory, yes, there was the elevated expense and op-x from the 2.6 billion in severance and office space charges. There was also a $988 million benefit from lower depreciation due to the change in useful lives, but that obviously is an ongoing benefit. And there was also as we noted in our earnings release, a benefit from the shift in timing of stock-based compensation from the first quarter to the second quarter. So a little bit of complexity there, but at the core of your question, we remain extremely focused on these various work streams that we've talked about.
It starts with the pace of hiring. It goes to the various work streams that both Sundar and I referenced around using AI and automation to improve productivity, all that we're doing with suppliers and vendors to be as efficient as possible, all that we're doing around optimizing how and where we work, you've seen some of those announcements. This quarter, beyond the workforce reduction, things that we're doing in, for example, office services and we're executing against each of these various work streams. So our view is that there's more to do, and as we try to be clear, we're in execution mode. You'll see some of the benefit in 23. You'll see more of it in 24, and we're going to continue building against it beyond. Great. Thank you. Thank you.
The next question comes from Michael Nathanson of Moffett, Nathanson. Please go ahead. I want to help one through it. Phil, we're trying to get under the hood on search advertising and trying to understand changes in demand between sellers of goods and sellers of services. You can get the same help looking at the service side, has the man return back to pretty pandemic levels and then in terms of goods and the commerce. Have you seen a slowing of demand? I think it helped with this level set it back to maybe pre-pandemic levels to understand, you know, that services versus the goods demand and for root on the terms of efficiency and being the result of that. How does this significantly harder cost a capital impact the way you imagine and evaluate the other best assets or anything there on. I may be rethinking from the other best and what are you doing and changing some of the structures about the other best assets.
Thanks. It was a bit hard to hear you were breaking up. So I think I wanted to start and address what I heard as the second question as we're looking at higher cost a capital and this environment. How does that affect the way we're looking at other bets? Hopefully we heard you correctly. It was crackling. Look, I think as we've talked about repeatedly as it relates to other bets, our focus is to use deep technology to drive innovation and we're very focused on the pace of investment, investment, and financial returns. That has been a consistent focus to generate attractive returns and I think the core operating models and the long term operating models are going to be the most relevant as we're looking at the returns we can generate. Yes, absolutely mindful of the higher cost capital, but I think it's core. We're looking at what's the what's the value creation and the return on those and as we indicated when we went through the reduction in force, we similarly worked across the other bets and some of them as they're on a path to to ongoing growth. We were moderating what is the expense trajectory there as we're looking at what's the overall return on invested capital and we're continuing to work on these to make sure that we're delivering value at your point is an important one that's part of a broader question about the underlying operating assumptions.
On the first part, again, it didn't come across quite clearly, but I hope I understood correctly in search revenues grew modestly year-to-year again reflecting an increase in their retail and travel verticals offset partially by decline in finance and media entertainment. So excluding the impact of FX performance was actually similar to last quarter, the ongoing performance of search notwithstanding the headwinds reflects really search resilience with the I'd say ability of search to surface demand and deliver a measurable R I in an uncertain environment. I called out the key verticals in the quarter. There's really no additional color on other verticals. I'd say maybe more broadly what we saw reflects what's being reported elsewhere and across the headlines, many companies are very focused on shorter term profitability amidst this uncertainty and some pullback at budgets as well. Thanks. That's clear. Thank you.
The next question comes from Mark Mahaney of Evercore. Please go ahead.
下一个问题来自Evercore的Mark Mahaney。请继续发问。
Okay. Could I try two questions please? I think Philip, you talked about them kind of a more of a pullback in network ad revenue versus search and YouTube. Do you have any thoughts on why that was the case? And then Ruth, the cloud business, even with the accounting changes shown this very steady march towards profitability, you turned the corner now, you talked about growing the business for long term profitability.
But are there any reasons why we wouldn't, whether it shouldn't be sustainably profitable, starting from here as the business continues to scale or could it be that that profitability could be wildly for a while before it's sustainably profitable, that segment cloud. Thank you.
Yeah, why not? I'll take both of those. So in network, really, it's a continuation of what we talked about last quarter, we saw the ongoing pullback in advertiser spend. And you know, I would contrast that last quarter, we talked about both pullback and YouTube and network. And we were pleased that we saw the stabilization and ad spend on the sequential basis in YouTube. We still saw ongoing pullback in network, which tends to be a mix of businesses as you know well.
And then in terms of cloud, you tried to make that clear and opening comments as well. I think it's a really important question. We are very pleased with the Q1 results. And as both center and I noted, we're, you know, intensely focused on all elements of the cost space and the long term path to attractive profitability.
At the same time, I think at the core of your question, what we were trying to convey is we will continue to invest to support long term growth. And in particular, given the opportunities, we see delivering AI capabilities to our customers. So, you know, as I said in the past, you shouldn't extrapolate from quarter to quarter, but we are very pleased to be at this level and are continuing to focus on profitability and long term value creation here.
Thank you to you for me as well. I guess first Sundar, the consolidation of the AI teams. I think you talked about that helping to accelerate innovation. So I'm curious, you know, specifically with that consolidation, what are the product milestones that we should look out for related to that.
And then Philip, regarding your comments on retail, specifically on shopping and payments. You know, how should we think about that evolving across the platform this year? Maybe similarly, what are some milestones we should look out for on that front?
Thanks. You know, I'm quite excited by bringing the two world class teams. I think of both brain and deep mind, the collective accomplishments in AI over the last decade, you know, really set the stage for this moment.
And so both, you know, both getting access to pool talent, you know, so that we can work together in a coordinated way and definitely will help us pull our computational resources to which is going to be critical. And we'll help us build, you know, the core core product is obviously building more capable models safely and responsibly and doing it, doing it, you know, taking into account all the capabilities our customers need both on the consumer side and the cloud side and being able to iterate and getting that virtual cycle going.
So you already, you know, have seen us, you know, put out palm APIs and we are incorporating palm across our products, but we'll continue that progress and, and you know, we'll keep you posted as we do.
So retailers and important vertical and driver for us and I called out the year we are increase in retail and search another. I also talked earlier about the macro climate and how we've established we can really drive value for retailers, even in challenging times, whether it's online offline both.
We're helping them drive their business goals meet customers, wherever they choose to shop maybe a little more some key trends here retailers are increasingly focused on maintaining margins and driving R.I. right now. B max broad match or key levers providing more incremental conversions while insights on Bidgin, but Bids and budgets are really helping retailers identify opportunities for growth and efficiencies across our suite of products.
I've taught at length on prior calls about omnichannel or local and omnichannel solutions are helping bridge the gap here between online offline by using AI to reach nearby shoppers, promoter local inventory fulfillment options, optimize in store visits and sales, for example.
And then to help really retain local customers and acquiring new ones we have YouTube app deep linking and new customer acquisition goals and pmax are helping here making checkouts easy was tools like virtual cards on chrome is obviously important.
So those are just some of the key points overall. We're giving retailers really the best I hope AI power tools and solutions to maximize reach and R.I. and really create a seamless experience including where possible on the payment side for their customers and this will continue to be our focus here.
Thank you and that concludes our question and answer session for today. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Jim Friedland for any further remarks.