Alphabet — the company formerly known as Google — reported some pretty good earnings today. For the first time, the company also broke out its revenue and loss from its “other bets” outside of the core products that still make up its Google subsidiary. These other bets generated $448 million in revenue in 2015 but Alphabet’s operating loss for those bets was almost $3.6 billion.
It’s worth noting that while “other bets” includes projects like the self-driving car pilots, the Calico health initiative, and other speculative projects (or ‘moonshots,’ as Alphabet likes to call them), Alphabet also includes Nest and Google Fiber, as well as its venture capital arms GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Google Capital.
As Google announced during its earnings call today, revenue for “other bets” is currently mostly driven by Nest, Google Fiber and — interestingly — Verily, which was previously known as Google Life Sciences.
Sadly, because so many different groups fall under “other bets,” we still don’t know how much Alphabet spends on self-driving cars and Project Loon, for example.
As Alphabet reported today, both of these numbers are up from 2014 when Google’s total revenue for these bets was $327 million with an operating loss of just under $2 billion. So while Google definitely tried to refocus many of its projects in the last year, the cost for running these programs only increased.