Google Just announced earnings for the fourth quarter. Revenues were up 17 percent to $6.7 billion, while non-GAAP earnings increased 35 percent to $2.2 billion, or 6.79 per share. That is well above the analyst consensus of $6.50 a share. The slides are above.

Revenues for the full year ended up being $23.65 billion, up from $21.8 billion in 2008. Net income for 2009 was $6.5 billion.

Google’s revenue in the quarter was broken down 66 percent (or $4.4 billion) from its own sites and 31 percent (or $2 billion) from AdSense revenues across its advertising network. The other 3 percent came from licensing and other businesses. While the Google’s ad revenue on its own sites increased 16 percent, AdSense revenues grew an even faster 21 percent.

Paid clicks on ads were up 13 percent annually and up 9 percent from the third quarter of 2009. The average cost per click was up 5 percent annually, and 2 percent sequentially.

The company ended the year with $24.5 billion in cash and 19,835 full-time employees (170 more people than on September 30, 2009).

My notes from the live conference call are below.

CEO Eric Schmidt:

Overall very pleased with performance. We are back in business full blast. Investing heavily. Excited to continue to reinvent search. Doing acquisitions at pace of one a month.

Jonathan Rosensweig:

Our strategy in 2009 was to double down on our core, search, advertising and display. Also wanted to invest in Chrome, [Android, other new products]. Internally we called this the “More wood behind fewer arrows” approach.

AdWords launched a new front end

Android started with 1 device, now at 20
Doubelclick now fully integrated, display ramping nicely.

Launched Chrome OS.

We saw a lot of businesses go to the cloud

YouTube is monetizing well

Most importantly, search is performing well. Also launched music search and realtime search.

In 20101 we will be investing. We will pour a lot into search. Key is time to result. How fast can we get a user to result. Also more types of ads.

Beyond search and search ads, a few major trends transforming the Internet.

The first is social. When you say social, people think of social networks, but all of the Web is becoming social. You will trust a restaurant review more from a friend, so maybe it should have a higher ranking, but only for you.

Also people researching shopping online more.

Personalizations, mobile. We think there is the potential to make the mobile Web better than the PC Web.

Organization are moving to the cloud not only because it is cheaper but because it is a better way to do things.

Read the original article at Tech Crunch:
Google 2009 Fourth Quarter Earnings