Comment by chrisdinn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisdinn | Hacker News Reader

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After years at Google on DFP/Ad Manager these quotes read kinda sad to me because this is a lot conspiracy sounding stuff and in reality it’s just not that kind of operation.

Sell-side ad tech (ie. DRX) doesn’t make much money for Google, relatively. If Google likes AdX why isn’t YT inventory on it? Because they actually like the buy-side tools. Sell-side gets basically no love, no real fresh ideas. I say this having the utmost, deep respect for Ad Manager/AdX’s current and former eng & product leaders.

What happens here isn’t about market dominance, no one is thinking that. They already killed the display publishing golden goose, by Google standards there’s nothing to dominate in pub ads the business died. It’s a small market, now, putting display ads on other people’s websites. Big business is O&O which exploded around it, this is obvious.

Projects like this are about two forces colliding: smart engineers without a deep understanding or connection to the publishing industry and an internal org losing relevance/importance as its size relative to its peers decreases.

IMO, (this is definitely just my opinion) the real real problem is none of the ads you can by through AdX actually work. Using OA a lot leads to users tuning out your ad units because they are often really weird or bad-quality & register as noise.

Sure DFP isn't where the money is, but on the buy side Google is abusing their monopoly and data in every way they can. The simplest example is that Google decided on privacy grounds to restrict access to the raw logs from all other ad-tech (typically running on AWS), while at the same time launching a new product called Ads Data Hub in Google Cloud where you can actually access all that data. If it was really about privacy they wouldn't use the data at all. The whole privacy thing is bullshit, they've just found yet another way to give themselves an advantage on the ad market.

Google has lost their "don't be evil" thing many years ago. Now they're just a global privacy disaster that's abusing their monopoly in ways that even Microsoft in the old days wouldn't dare.

I don’t think this is a convincing argument. I don’t believe it’s good to allow third party tracking pixels on youtube.com (for instance) and the alternative way for buyside to get that data is ADH. It sucks compared to prior state for people who need to use it, but it’s necessary to provide user protection.

What are O&O and OA?

I was going to ask as well. There’s an incredible amount of jargon around internet ads and marketing in general. Impenetrable to non practitioners imo.

First is “owned and operated” as in YouTube is a property that is “owned and operated” by google.

OA is just open auction which is what most people think of when they think of AdX, ie. more or less anyone can bids on your inventory.

O&O is owned and operated, where you actually own the audience. In the simplest case this is like YT or Insta for Google and FB but it can be kinda nuanced with more traffic falling under the umbrella than you’d think. More and more this is where energy and attention is being focused, especially as cross-site data becomes scarcer.

Could you explain O&O more? Surely all sites where ads appear are owned and operated by someone, that sounds kind of tautological. Or do you mean, the ad infrastructure itself is owned and operated by the site owner - in which case, what is there for Google to do?

You want to flip this. Google/Facebook operate the ad tech and own the site (or, more accurately the audience) so they don’t need to deal with third-party publishers on a per-request basis at all.

The point is that selling ads on third party sites is not where the money is at these days. It’s in selling ads on your own properties. For Google, that’s YouTube, search and Maps. For FB, that’s FB and Instagram.

It refers to when the same company both owns the site/content and operates the advertising for it.

Google has search, maps, gmail, youtube. Facebook has its social media sites, Amazon has amazon.com, Yahoo has its own sites. Bigger publishers with enough scale also run their own ad infrastructure, for example Washington Post has some of the most advanced in-house adtech.

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