Today, Google put a bow on the first quarter of 2013 with $14.0 billion in revenue, a 31 percent year-over-year increase. But that revenue, largely from ads, seems totally unrelated to the company’s most innovative products.

“Over the last two years, we’ve worked hard to increase our velocity … and make big bets,” said CEO Larry Page in a call with investors.

Talking about some of the mid-range bets — products like Google Now, voice search, Chrome’s speech API, and Google Play — Page highlighted the company’s innovations and releases for the quarter, saying, “In the same way, we need to make advertising across all platforms easy for our customers. … I’ve been very pleased with the progress so far. We’re moving … a whole ecosystem on a dime.”

But what about expensive projects that stir the imagination but leave the Scrooge McDuck-like bank vault empty?

“It’s super important to stay focused on the future. Companies tend to get comfortable doing what they’ve always done … but incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time, especially in technology,” Page said. “So a big part of my job is to get people to focus on things that are not just incremental.”

That involves explaining to investors why Google is spending so much time and effort on “speculative projects such as self-driving cars,” Glass, and Google Fiber.

While these products are money-losers for now, Page said, “The best people want to work on the biggest bets … Someday, we’ll all be amazed that computing involved fishing around in pockets and purses.”

He continued, “There are so many opportunities to create technology that makes people’s lives better. … We’re still just getting started.”

Q1 was a quarter filled with rumors and excitement about Google’s future — self-driving cars, a smartwatch prototype, and the wildly popular-in-the-public-imagination Google Glass. In fact, Google chose to open its investors’ call webcast with a Google Glass commercial featuring the Google campus, its iconic multi-colored bikes, and exec Vic Gundotra.

But though those products (or potential products) drove the company’s press coverage in the first months of 2013, they weren’t what was driving its revenue.

For Google’s bottom line, we have to look to boring staples: Online ads. Search ads. Display ads. The company’s revenue from ads totalled nearly $13 billion.

As marketing intelligence firm eMarketer pointed out via email, Google controls more share than any other company in pretty much every facet of online ads, including U.S. online search, display, and mobile advertising. In the U.S., Google will take home around 41 percent of all digital ad spend.

One newer money-maker for the company was mobile. The total mobile ad spend for U.S. companies is still only around $7.3 billion, but Google claims 54.7 percent of that pie, eMarketer analysts say.

The only place where Google lags in mobile is mobile display ads, where newcomer Facebook has taken a surprisingly strong lead.

Motorola Mobile revenues were $1.02 billion, or around seven percent of the total. Restructuring charges arising from the Motorola deal were $66 million, and the related tax benefits were $23 million. The Motorola side of Google’s business is still recording GAAP and non-GAAP losses for the quarter, 27 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

As the second quarter begins, Google’s cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities sit at $50.1 billion. Non-U.S. revenues were at $7.1 billion.

Google celebrated its first-ever $50 billion year in 2012, a feat Page called “not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half.”

Google’s long-planned stock split is still in the works, with 3 million unpriced shares earmarked and unsold.

Here’s a snapshot of the company’s financials over the past five years:

Meanwhile, Google’s stock price is solidly in the middle of its class, gaining around eight percent over the past quarter. As of this writing stock ticker GOOG is trading at $767.68, up from $732.87 at the time of the company’s last earnings call:

Photo credit: Project Glass/Google+

$50,175,000,000: That’s Google’s bottom-line earnings for 2012.

In a highly anticipated statement, the search/mobile/social/maps/kitchen sink titan revealed the grand totals for last year’s business, including $14.42 billion for the final three months of 2012, up 36 percent year over year.

In a statement to investors, Google CEO Larry Page said the results are “not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. In today’s multiscreen world, we face tremendous opportunities as a technology company focused on user benefit. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at Google.”

In response to the earnings news, Google stock was trading at $732.87 as of this writing, down less than 1 percent for the day and up around 8 percent over the past quarter.

The company stated its GAAP net income for Q4 totaled $2.89 billion (up from $2.71 billion in Q4 2011); net cash from operating activities was $4.67 billion (up from $3.92 billion in Q4 2011); and the total warchest of Google’s cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities came out to $48.1 billion as of Dec. 31. The company’s full-time employee headcount includes 53,861 souls — 37,544 in Google proper and 11,113 in Motorola Mobile, with 5,204 employed by Motorola Home.

For contrast, Google showed a 25 percent year-over-year increase for the year prior, with $10.58 billion in revenues for the same period a year ago — around three times the amount reported by Facebook for the same time period.

As usual, most of the company’s revenue — a whopping $12 billion of the quarter’s $14 billion total, in fact — came from ads. According to research firm eMarketer, Google dominates the digital ad game, having collected around 41 percent of all online and mobile ad dollars in the country. This means Google has more market share of the U.S. online search, display, and mobile advertising markets than any other company, period. Also, Google cleans up in search ads, still the biggest piece of the digital ads pie, taking home around three quarters of business in a $17.58 billion market, eMarketer said.

The 2012 books include final financials for the acquisition of Motorola Mobility as well as accounting for the sale of Motorola Home, a Google TV competitor.

The former deal was first announced in August 2011 with Moto shareholders giving the go-ahead in November the same year, only to see the deal hit its first regulatory stumbling block the nest month. While lawmakers expressed their concerns about the deal, a few hurdles were cleared in early 2012, and the $12.5 billion buy-out finally closed in May 2012. Now that it’s officially part of the Google family, Motorola Mobile revenues were $1.51 billion, or 11 percent of consolidated revenues in the fourth quarter of 2012.

As for the latter deal, which was worth $2.35 billion, Google told investors earlier this month that “financial results from Motorola Home will be presented as a separate line item” as discontinued operations and that Home-related revenue would be split between Google’s ongoing operations and the Home side. If the Moto Home sale had been included, consolidated revenues would have been $15.24 billion for the quarter.

So, what about that stock split the company announced back in April? A shareholder lawsuit gummed up the works for that one. While the move passed a shareholder vote in June, the split, which would create a third class of stock, was still pending as of September.

Top image courtesy of John of Austin/Flickr

The resounding feedback from Google’s earnings call today? Take a step back, ease the pressure of the public gaze, and let Google do its due diligence. World, take a chill pill.

Google’s new subsidiary, Motorola, brought in a cool $1.25 billion in earnings, which amounts to roughly 10 percent of the company’s revenues in the second quarter of 2012. It fared better than expected, but still reported operating losses of $233 million. The mobile business lost $192 million, and the home segment lost $41 million.

Read more about Google’s Q2 revenues here.

When probed further about losses and its “strategic asset,” Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette urged for patience. ”We are totally excited about this opportunity with Motorola,” he said.

Fielding questions on Thursday’s call, Pichette emphasized that the management team has only been involved with Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. (“MMI”) a few weeks. ”Clearly, everyone should expect changes at Motorola,” he said. “We have to let them do their work.” For more potential post-acquisition changes and layoffs, read the full report.

While the numbers may suggest otherwise, Google executives emphasized that they are seeing phenomenal growth and remain committed to mobile. “Mobile is where search was in 1999,” said Nikesh Arora, chief business officer. “Mobile is going to be as core as desktop search was,” he added.

Pichette said that operating losses for the cell phone maker could be partially explained by “accounting noise.” If you remove some of the adjustments related to the acquisition, he explained, it has been a stable quarter.

Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion in May, 2012. The acquisition added 20,293 employees this quarter, bringing Google’s total headcount to 54,604.

To learn more, read VentureBeat’s in-depth take on Google’s antitrust accusations and acquisition plans here.

In its quarterly earnings statement today, Google announced it would for the first time in its history be splitting its stock.

“Today, we announce plans to create a new class of non-voting stock,” Google CEO Larry Page (pictured) said Thursday in an investors call.

In the same call, the company announced its Q1 2012 earnings, showing revenues up 24 percent year-over-year to a healthy $10.65 billion.

Emphasizing that the non-voting nature of the new class of stock would not have much of an impact on how the company is controlled, the search-giant co-founder continued, “This proposal will only have an effect on governance in the very long term… We are honored that so many of you have put your trust in us.”

The statement about trust speaks to the voting rights maintained by Google’s founders, who each get ten votes per share of stock they hold. The arrangement is akin to how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arranged to maintain control of his company and board following the social network’s highly anticipated IPO.

And speaking of Facebook, Google is picking a strategic time to split its stock. The social network is Google’s biggest rival — and its strongest competitor for the ad dollars that make up a whopping 96 percent of Google’s revenue. By splitting its stock just weeks (in all likelihood) before Facebook’s IPO, Google is sending a message to potential investors: Bet on us. We’re a sure thing. We’ve been around for eight years, and we’re only getting more valuable over time.

In the past, Google management has stated the company is averse to stock splits, especially as the company’s share prices edged higher and higher over the past decade, making it more difficult for average consumers to consider investing in the company. Page today reiterated that Google’s current dual-class structure’s bias toward stability will be maintained in the new split and that investors would still be betting heavily on the company’s leadership and founders.

In today’s two-for-one split, each current shareholder will get an additional non-voting share for each share of Google stock he or she currently holds. In other words, if I owned 100 shares of Google stock, I would close the day with 200 shares of Google stock.*

These new shares will also be used for equity-based employee compensation.

Google SVP David Drummond gave more details about the stock split, saying that Class C stock will have equivalent rights to Class A and Class B stock, but without voting privileges. Existing shares will continue to trade, and Class C shares will also be publicly listed.

Typically in a two-for-one split, the share price is adjusted accordingly so that Google shares, which are currently trading at around $650 each, will see a dip down to half that amount, roughly $325 per share. But the price will not likely stay that low for long, meaning potential (and less-than-wealthy) investors have a great chance to hop onboard the Google bandwagon before shares become unattainably expensive again.

Google made its initial public offering in 2004 at $85 per share, peaking at $714.87 on December 7, 2007. During 2007, the Google executive team had to consistently douse rumors of a stock split.

Google’s shares have topped tech stocks for some time; in fact, Apple stock prices surpassed Google’s for the first time ever earlier this month — an apparent fluke, as Google’s share price is currently hovering around $36 higher than its rival’s.

*Note: This example was for illustrative purposes only. None of the VentureBeat writers, myself included, own technology stock, and we are prohibited from buying tech stock in our company’s ethics statement.

Google today announced its earnings for the first quarter of the year, including revenues of $10.65 billion for the quarter.

That sum is up a tidy 24 percent from Q1 revenues last year, which came in at $8.58 billion. These numbers are also slightly higher than the $10.58 billion in revenue posted during the final quarter of 2011.

In its quarterly call, Google revealed the company would be splitting its stock for the first time in its history. This highly anticipated move has been debated by outside analysts every so often over the past five years, especially as Google’s price per share has crept toward and over $700.

For Q1 2012, Google-owned sites generated revenues of $7.31 billion, or 69 percent (stop snickering, you in the back) of total revenue. Around 27 percent of revenue came from Google’s partner sites, accounting for $2.91 billion of revenue totals.

Interestingly, the majority of Google’s revenue came from outside the United States. International revenues totaled $5.77 billion, representing 54 percent of total revenue.

Paid click revenues were up by 39 percent, while cost-per-click revenues were down 12 percent in Q1.

Operating costs for the company were slightly higher year-over-year ($3.47 billion compared to $3.34 billion), but they made up a smaller percentage of revenues (33 percent in Q1 2012 compared to 39 percent in Q1 2011).

Google’s GAAP net income in the first quarter of 2012 was $2.89 billion, compared to $1.80 billion in the first quarter of 2011.

The company now employees 33,077 full-time staff members as of March 31, 2012, an increase from 32,467 full-time employees at the end of 2011.

Currently, GOOG is trading at $651.01, up 2.37 percent from its start today at $641.60.