[HN Gopher] Google's advertising tech targeted in European publi...
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Google's advertising tech targeted in European publishers'
complaint
Author : pseudolus
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-02-11 10:00 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| jdrc wrote:
| 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
| otherotherchris wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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).
| jefftk wrote:
| 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?
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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)
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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 5C/ 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| 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)
| skinkestek wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| mathteddybear wrote:
| 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.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| otherotherchris wrote:
| 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.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| 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
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| evancoop wrote:
| 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.
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