Google's advertising tech targeted in European publishers' complaint | Hacker News Reader

Google's advertising tech targeted in European publishers' complaint

reuters.com

56 pointspseudolus19 comments

This is a fascinating defense:

"When publishers choose to use our advertising services, they keep the majority of revenue and every year we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network," a Google spokesperson said.

In other words, "our ads help other entities make money." Well yes, they're ads! That seems, even for a spokesperson, to be a rather stunning evasion. One could even amend the argument as "even if we don't play fair, the folks we cheat still make money."

The problem isn't that the ads are ineffective. The issue is that Google's scale all-but-requires that one advertise with them, and then in turn, they harvest prodigious quantities of data about everything and everyone to target those ads... and demand everyone else play by rules favorable to Google.

Well, the European Publishers Council published an "executive summary" of their complaint

https://www.epceurope.eu/executive-summary

and they just seem to copy stuff from Texas AG third-amended doc.

As you seem to understand, to match the quality of Google ad matching process a competitor has to match the AI/ML of Google. Obviously it's not the first thing a spokesperson will say to a news agency.

I think it s more important to investigate the collusion between advertisers and google. You rarely read about advertisers and why they give all their inventory to google, which is the reason why there is no competition in the space.

Fines were never to going to work, they are not just "cost of doing business", they are the cost of buying a monopoly

After selling costs, regulatory costs, and handing over the bulk of revenue to publishers, Google's yield on this third party ad inventory must be below 10%. Globally it's less than 15% of Google's total ad revenue overall.

What's the point of being in this business? You're making a lot of powerful people angry for almost zero profit.

> What's the point of being in this business?

Search depends on having sites to link people to, and those sites primarily use ads for monetization. If Google shut down their display advertising business, web publishers overall would make far less money in the short term, and it's not clear how long recovery would take.

Disclosure: I work at Google on display ads, speaking only for myself -- I don't know what the company's strategy is here.

I ran a few very successful web sites in the years before and after the advent of Google AdSense. This struck me as a strange thought:

If Google shut down their display advertising business, web publishers overall would make far less money in the short term,

It was Google that destroyed the online display advertising business with its auctions and race-to-the bottom strategy. Before AdSense, we would negotiate with local advertisers and partner with national advertising networks. Local ads we sold got us $50-$115 CPM. National networks, like TribalFusion, got us $15-$40 CPM, with occasional specialty campaigns that could bring in up to $100 CPM. I remember the days of configuring our network accounts to reject ads that paid less than $25 CPM.

Google turned all that into pennies. When you put AdSense on your web site and see that you're only getting 5¢ CPM, you know who to blame: Google. Even the hated "Punch the Monkey" paid two orders of magnitude more than 95% of Google ads today.

and it's not clear how long recovery would take.

It took three to five years for Google to destroy online advertising. Perhaps it will take the same amount of time for it to recover.

Major publishers still make most of their money through direct deals with advertisers, even publishers that use Google's ad server (Google Ad Manager, formerly DoubleClick for Publishers).

Auctions for remaining inventory, or for publishers who are too small to find it worthwhile to negotiate direct deals, seems to me like something that is here to stay, regardless of Google's involvement?

(Still speaking only for myself)

Recently I have been using Marginalia a bit.

Surprisingly often not only do I find usable results with Marginalia but even better results.

A good deal of what Marginalia does different[1] seems to be to strongly prefer pages with less ads and tracking.

Sadly for Google and happily for me and others there is an amazing amount of good content that surfaces once you peel away the cookie cutter, maximum ad, maximum tracking web sites.

For now we need some of those ad filled pages but if the marked changes I am fairly sure most of them will adapt or be replaced.

[1]: besides being a real search engine instead of vector search or whatever it is Google and Bing does that feeds me with several non-matches in every search.

Edit, I got a downvote and while I don't care about the exact points I guess it is because someone think I exaggerate wildly, so here is a challenge, try to repeat this search in your favorite mainstream engine and see what results you get: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=windows+linux+dual...

> Google shut down their display advertising business, web publishers overall would make far less money in the short term, and it's not clear how long recovery would take.

I would ask for an independent study to confirm this. On the surface at least this sounds unlikely (to put it mildly).

If you remove a large component of publisher revenue, the total will go down in the short term. That doesn't seem like a very strong claim?

> If you remove a large component of publisher revenue

1. If you remove Google Ads it doesn't mean other ad systems disappear

2. Google has been caught red handed preventing other ad platforms from competing. https://www.axios.com/google-facebook-conspired-manipulate-a...

3. Google was caught overcharging advertisers and pocketing the difference https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alphabet-and-facebook-ceos...

It's quite possible that if Google Ads go away, it will be a net positive for the system.

> 1. If you remove Google Ads it doesn't mean other ad systems disappear

Sure. But in general you should expect that if you remove one system you are going to see short term loss at a minimum. For example, some advertisers will not be set up on other platforms and other platforms will realize they can raise fees now that they have less competition. Eventually you likely end up with a system very similar to the status quo, as new and existing competitors fully build out replacements for what Google runs today, but it takes a while.

> 2. Google has been caught red handed preventing other ad platforms from competing. ... 3. Google was caught overcharging advertisers and pocketing the difference

It looks to me like both of these are citing the same lawsuit, which is still in progress. I'm not supposed to comment on the details of ongoing litigation, but when we see this lawsuit fully run its course I think both of those articles will be seen to have overstated their claims.

> But in general you should expect that if you remove one system you are going to see short term loss at a minimum

Yes. As any system/platform change. They are called business expenses.

> Eventually you likely end up with a system

That provides advertisement, and there are dozens of replacements (there were probably hundreds until Google)

Maybe the point isn't to make money, but to occupy space in the market and boost their power in other markets as a result.

If they want to "occupy space" they could just roll out an ad blocker into Chrome. Nuke all 3rd party advertising from orbit.

I'm sure they could find a way to make youtube ads unskipable.

Wow now there's an interesting thought experiment.

As much as I'd love to see a real adblocker in chrome (even though I don't use it) I guess you could read that as "near-monopoly producer of browser software uses their market force to gain an upper-hand in a different branch of their business."

That reads like a textbook anti-trust lawsuit :P

If Google aren't selling them then someone else will, and that means someone else is building marketshare and using the profit to grow. That represents a threat to Google's main ad business. The last thing Google want is for an advertiser or a pubisher to use a separate service for part of their inventory, because that means someone else has direct access to their customer.

Google's main ad business is on Google owned properties. Always has been.

The biggest existential threat to Google is that Google has abandoned management focus on developing it's core offerings (Search, Cloud, Maps, GSuite, GMail, Messaging) to fight stupid antitrust battles with the EU over a tiny slither of profit in a completely irrelevant side business.

Reputational damage alone is driving away huge amounts of Cloud and GSuite business.

Sure there might have been no profit in making gay doodles for Putin. With ads, "almost" zero profit turns out to be a unicorn sized I guess. If we have to stick to that shallow judgement.

On the other side of a spectrum is "we make world wide web a better place by funneling advertiser spend towards quality websites". True story.

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