5 Best Advertising and Ad Tech Stocks To Buy Now

3. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 209

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) owns and operates Google which is the world’s most widely used search engine, and YouTube the leading online video-sharing platform. The majority of Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) revenues — over 80% — come from selling advertisement space on its various platforms. In 2021, the company generated revenues of $147 billion from Google Ads.

This February, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) reported that its revenues for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2021 amounted to $75.33 billion, up 32.39% year over year, beating revenue estimates by $3.50 billion. Approximately $61.2 billion of these revenues came from Google advertising.

On March 18, 2022, Tigress Financial analyst Ivan Feinseth raised his price target on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) to $3,670 from $3,540 and maintained a Strong Buy rating on the shares. The analyst commented that the company reported strong Q4 2021 results and its ongoing investments in Artificial Intelligence will enhance user and business experiences, therefore adding value to the stock. The analyst sees the company developing a stronghold in areas including Search, mobile, Cloud, data center, e-commerce, entertainment, home automation, autonomous vehicles, and health and fitness.

Investors and analysts are bullish on Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL). By the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, 209 hedge funds held stakes in Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) which were worth $32.34 billion. This is compared to 195 positions in the prior quarter with stakes worth $28.55 billion.

Vulcan Value Partners mentioned Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) in its fourth-quarter 2021 investor letter. Here is what the firm had to say:

“In contrast, we made a different kind of mistake about a decade ago. Google, now Alphabet, performed very well for us while we owned it. The company kept outperforming our assumptions and we kept lowering them to be conservative. “Trees do not grow to the sky.” The stock kept going up and our value grew but did not keep pace with the stock. It hit our estimate of fair value and we sold it with a nice gain, patting ourselves on the back. We kept following the company and what they actually did over the next several years was roughly double the assumptions we used to value it. Therefore, our value was too conservative, and we sold it too cheaply, missing many years of compounding. Fortunately, we experienced some volatility several years ago that allowed us to purchase Alphabet (Google) again with a margin of safety.”