April 28, 2022: -Alphabet reported weak earnings and revenue for the first quarter on Tuesday. The stock slid nearly 3% in extended trading.

Google’s revenue came at $68.01 billion, a growth of 23% from the same period in the previous year. That’s a slowdown from 34% growth in the first quarter of 2021, when the economy was opening again from the pandemic.

The company reports $54.66 billion in advertising revenue for the quarter, up from $44.68 billion.

YouTube ad revenue for the quarter came down short of analyst expectations. The miss comes as TikTok captures a growing social media video market share. The video site benefited from the pandemic when users were primarily at home on devices.

CFO Ruth Porat said on the analyst call that YouTube saw “modest growth,” mostly in direct response ads. She noted that the deceleration primarily reflects tough comparisons to a solid first quarter of 2021.

CEO Sundar Pichai said on the call that YouTube’s TikTok competitor called Shorts, which is now 30 billion daily views, which is double the number of views the prior quarter and four times as the year before.

Google’s cloud business stood out in the quarter, growing 44% and beating estimates as more big enterprises shift their workloads away from their data centers. Although, the cloud division is still losing money, reporting an operating loss of $931 million, compared to $974 million a year earlier.

During the quarter, Google halts much of its Russian operations because of the invasion of Ukraine. Revenue growth in the European region, including the Middle East and Africa, slowed to 19% in the first quarter from 33% a year earlier.

Alphabet’s Other Bets, including its life sciences companies and self-driving car unit Waymo, nearly doubled revenue from the year before to $440 million from $198 million. The unit’s loss slowly increased to $1.15 billion.