Strong YouTube ad growth powers Alphabet to better-than-expected Q3

Today after the bell, Alphabet announced its Q3 performance. The Google parent company generated revenues of $46.2 billion and per-share profit of $16.40 off the back of net income of $11.2 billion.

Analysts had expected Alphabet to earn $11.21 per share, from revenues of $42.88 billion according to Yahoo Finance; other estimates were larger, targeting $11.37 in per-share income off revenue of $42.84 billion.

The company's shares instantly rose around 8.5% after its earnings beat.

Digging into the company's numbers, YouTube revenue rose to $5.0 billion, from $3.8 billion in Q3 2019. Analysts had expected YouTube to generate $4.52 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.

Google Cloud managed to generate $3.44 billion from $2.4 billion in Q3 2019. The Google Cloud collection of cloud computing, productivity software, and other enterprise services generated $3.0 billion in the second quarter of this year. Analysts had expected Google Cloud to generate $3.31 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.

And Alphabet's skunkworks division, Other Bets managed to generate $178 million in revenue, another quarter in which the set of companies was an excellent source of negative operating income. The collection of efforts lost $1.1 billion in the quarter.