Google stock is down significantly in the last couple days of trading, along with the market as a whole. Google is reporting earnings soon and has been growing at an impressive pace each quarter but there is now some doubt about the company’s earnings going forward.

Specifically there has been a lot of talk that Adsense revenue for web publishers is down considerably since Google shrunk the “clickable area” of their ad units. This change has caused some major websites to see 50+% declines in clicks and thus a decrease in revenue as well. Google is surely taking a hit from this new policy as earnings per click are not increasing to offset the decline in the quantity of clicks.

Since web publishers generate 40% of Google’s earnings, unless the company begins to take a bigger percentage of click revenue away from these web publishers or make it up with increased revenue from Google.com, the coming quarterly earnings could be a disappointment and send the stock down even further.

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