{"id":319721,"date":"2025-08-05T11:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T11:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/319721\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T11:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T11:48:11","slug":"more-like-no-yield-a-new-book-explores-how-google-soaked-up-the-webs-ad-profits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/319721\/","title":{"rendered":"More Like No Yield: A New Book Explores How Google Soaked Up The Web\u2019s Ad Profits"},"content":{"rendered":"

The English word \u201cyield,\u201d derived<\/a> from old English, is a relic of a time when a ruling class might demand anything cultivated by those beneath them. So the word encapsulates two seemingly opposing definitions: there is \u201cyield,\u201d as in crops, and \u201cyield,\u201d to surrender or hand over.<\/p>\n

Which makes it an apt headline for Ari Paparo\u2019s new book on Google\u2019s ad tech antitrust saga. The full title pulls no punches: Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance<\/a>. \n <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to write it so it\u2019s not exclusively for ad tech nerds,\u201d Paparo told AdExchanger. \u201cAnd I mean that affectionately.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, for the ad tech nerds out there, be warned: This book may leave you boiling in rage. It is not light, fun summer book list material.<\/p>\n

Programmatic veterans may find it strange to read a non-fiction narrative story featuring a cast of characters they know: Steph Layser, Jana Meron, Brian O\u2019Kelley, Michael Barrett, Michael Rubenstein and many other industry leaders play prominent roles. But the strongest emotions are an uncomfortable mix of vindication of your paranoid suspicions being proven true, and fury at the same.<\/p>\n

The story<\/strong><\/p>\n

The scene-setter for Yield is a 2019 meeting with major publishers hosted by Google to outline new ad exchange policies, including \u201cUnified Pricing\u201d rules that forbid publishers from setting different pricing floors for certain supply chain partners.<\/p>\n

Unified Pricing was a bald power-grab move by Google. These new rules prohibited many \u201ccommon techniques that were proven to generate incremental revenue\u201d for publishers, as Paparo writes, because doing so disempowered Google\u2019s ad tech model.<\/p>\n

The meeting was a disaster. Publisher execs lost their decorum. Paparo cites AdExchanger\u2019s Sarah Sluis, who dryly summed the matter up<\/a> at the time: \u201cIt did not go well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paparo draws a dotted line from this epic fail of a product announcement to the Department of Justice\u2019s ongoing antitrust lawsuit. In April, the DOJ found Google guilty of operating a sell-side ad tech monopoly (in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets, specifically).<\/p>\n

Prior to this 2019 meeting, Paparo writes that publishers were in a \u201clow-grade conflict\u201d with Google over its ad tech policies and their own dependence on Google ad revenue.<\/p>\n


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After the infamous 2019 meeting, Google\u2019s \u201cmalfeasance was nakedly apparent,\u201d Paparo writes.<\/p>\n

Building a monopoly<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yield can be broken loosely into two sections.<\/p>\n

The first half documents the construction of what eventually would become a monopolistic behemoth. This is based primarily on interviews with early product leaders from Google and companies like DoubleClick, Invite Media and AdMeld that Google acquired.<\/p>\n

Paparo had front-row seats to some early renovation work, having joined Google via the DoubleClick acquisition. He was also on the team that spearheaded Google\u2019s Invite Media acquisition.<\/p>\n

The second part of the book concerns the secret policy changes and internal rationales that fractured Google\u2019s relationship with major publishers. In particular, Google aggressively sought to quash header bidding. These facts are documented more by legal disclosures and testimony during the ad tech antitrust trial.<\/p>\n

There are also some fun miscellaneous tidbits, especially from the early days of Google\u2019s ad tech,<\/p>\n

Michael Rubenstein, one of the creators of Google\u2019s Ad Exchange product (the one-time AdX, which remains universally known as \u201cAdX\u201d although that brand has long since ceased to exist), says the name \u201cAdX,\u201d including the exact camel case capitalization, came to him in a dream. Also, the Googler in charge of two rounds of massive headcount reductions at DoubleClick was Patricia Severynse, pronounced \u201cseverance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just move past it.<\/p>\n

Early on, though, many of Google\u2019s decisions weren\u2019t necessarily anticompetitive, Paparo told AdExchanger.<\/p>\n

Rather than one or two flagrantly immoral decisions, Paparo said that Google\u2019s internal messages reveal \u201ca lot of these deferred, incremental, not-in-the-customer\u2019s interest kind of decisions\u201d accruing over time.<\/p>\n

And some important pieces of evidence against Google are based on grand extrapolations of small words. In one internal Google email from 2010 touted by the DOJ antitrust prosecutors, Neal Mohan, now CEO of YouTube, discusses buying a publisher ad exchange startup \u201cand parking it somewhere.\u201d The idea being Google would offer its own version eventually. Google would go on to do this with AdMeld.<\/p>\n

From an offhand internal email from 15 years ago, the word choice and specific parameters meant by \u201cparking\u201d became the center of serious courtroom debate during one of the country\u2019s most important ever antitrust trials.<\/p>\n

Which is an indicator that no sure-fire smoking gun email was identified with Google execs clearly outlining an illegal case for one of their acquisitions or important policy changes.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s guilty conscience<\/strong><\/p>\n

The DOJ may have no explicitly incriminating internal message or Google statement. But, on the other hand, Google\u2019s efforts to cover its tracks reveal a guilty conscience, or at least some self-awareness that the market, if not law enforcement, would disapprove of its behavior.<\/p>\n

Project Poirot, Project Bell, Project Bernanke, Project Jedi Blue, Project Liberty, Project Wolf and Project Centillion is a non-exhaustive list of the secret Google undertakings<\/a> from Yield.<\/p>\n

Jedi Blue, for instance, was a secret deal Google cut with Facebook to divert spend from header bidding and preserve Google\u2019s last-look bidding advantage. Bernanke, and later Project Bell, created a global pool of liquid funds that could be used to inflate bids and bid density for publishers that granted Google preferred auction treatment, while drastically diverting budgets from publishers that gave the same access to a competitor like Criteo.<\/p>\n

Wielding a monopoly<\/strong><\/p>\n

One fun speculative game you can play if you have a book club that reads books like Yield is to debate whether Google could have gotten away with it, so to speak, if the company had just displayed an ounce of introspection or common decency towards its customers.<\/p>\n

No joke, we are talking about world-historic levels of blind arrogance. This is President George Bush standing before a \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d banner boasting of being welcomed to Iraq as liberators. It is \u201cLet them eat cake.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Yield, Paparo documents Google execs time and again displaying a patronizing attitude toward clients, partners, regulators and other mega-conglomerates like Comcast, to a degree that comes across mainly as contempt. It is like if someone tried to hoodwink you by spelling out words, as an adult might do when talking about \u201cI-C-E-C-R-E-A-M\u201d in front of an excitable child.<\/p>\n

For example, even going into the 2019 publisher meeting debacle, most Google higher-ups and product managers seemed honestly to believe that the policy updates would be welcomed by publishers.<\/p>\n

One thing that stood out in the hundreds of pages of emails and messages that were disclosed as part of the DOJ suit, Paparo told me, is that Google execs publicly and privately were saying, over and over, that publishers were wrong, that header bidding was not sustainable, and that publishers did not understand the implications of their decisions.<\/p>\n

\u201cPubs are gambling and can\u2019t actually see the opportunity costs of doing this,\u201d one Google product manager emailed in an internal thread about the surging adoption of header bidding in 2015 (in response to an AdExchanger article<\/a>, not to brag). Others on the thread confidently predicted that page latency and \u201csuboptimal setups\u201d on sites would preclude adoption.<\/p>\n

One customer-facing rep, a Michelle Sarlo Dauwalter, responded: \u201cIf we are committed to competition, and we believe competition drives revenue, we should allow for all sources of demand to compete fairly, in real-time (or as close to real-time) as possible. While I can help our Sales team build a story around latency and lost impressions \u2026 the fact remains that if we allowed for real-time competition across all demand sources, we wouldn\u2019t even need to have that conversation!\u201d<\/p>\n

One imagines her being quietly removed from the chat.<\/p>\n

\u2018Institutional arrogance\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Google\u2019s unique mix of indifference and superiority towards its customers and partners pervades its dealings with regulators and businesses.<\/p>\n

Paparo, in an interview with AdExchanger, described Google as having a sense of \u201cinstitutional arrogance.\u201d Googlers tend to think that what\u2019s best for Google is what\u2019s best and right for the industry, he said, and that Google would \u201cfix the industry, more or less, from all the less sophisticated outside ad tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is not how it played out, however.<\/p>\n

In 2017, for instance, Google announced an ad exchange policy update, which was known internally as Project Poirot and released as Optimized Fixed Bidding, that dramatically reduced DSP spend to competitors like PubMatic, AppNexus and OpenX. This became a crisis for third-party ad tech, exacerbated by the fact that Google gave no heads up to customers and stonewalled all outreach on the topic.<\/p>\n

Rajiv Goel, CEO of PubMatic, who was a nine-figure-paying customer of the Google Cloud business and a major SSP partner, was asked during court testimony what Google could have done to forestall the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake a phone call,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Paparo writes that one of the precursors to Google\u2019s regulatory antitrust headaches in Europe came about when Google unceremoniously removed Comcast-owned FreeWheel\u2019s right to serve ads to YouTube, which previously had been allowed, without notice or explanation.<\/p>\n

Comcast flagged the issue to Congress and EU regulators and FreeWheel was eventually allowed to resume serving ads to Comcast content on YouTube. But four years of wasted opportunity had passed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not even clear if Google did any of this out of malice; it seems more likely it was a mixture of indifference and fear of a privacy backlash.\u201d Paparo writes of the FreeWheel incident (of which he may have unique insight, since he founded the DSP Beeswax that sold to FreeWheel).<\/p>\n

Google brought the same blustering attitude to its DOJ ad tech antitrust trial.<\/p>\n

Paparo recounts one incident when the DOJ brought practitioner witness Matthew Wheatland, who ran the programmatic tech for Daily Mail Group, back to the stand.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as his name was announced, the courtroom broke into objections,\u201d Paparo writes. As it turns out, and as Google\u2019s attorneys intuited immediately, Wheatland was returning to the stand to counterbalance Mark Israel, an economist and expert witness for Google who had discussed market forces in vague, professorial terms.<\/p>\n

Wheatland\u2019s rebuttal testimony, based on practical, real-world knowledge, was \u201cdevastating to Dr. Israel\u2019s credibility,\u201d Paparo writes.<\/p>\n

If there is any narrative throughline with Yield, whether it\u2019s in courtrooms, Slack messages or fancy client meetings, it is an unabashed attitude within Google that everyone who isn\u2019t a Googler, is an idiot.<\/p>\n

Paparo told AdExchanger that he reached out to Google execs for his book he \u201cgot no real response from current Googlers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had 1,000s of their emails, though,\u201d he added. \u201cSo I didn\u2019t really need to talk to them too much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The English word \u201cyield,\u201d derived from old English, is a relic of a time when a ruling class…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[7155,116008,17588,3444,77,1123,867,116009,16,15,10215],"class_list":{"0":"post-319721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-antitrust","9":"tag-ari-paparo","10":"tag-book-review","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-featured","14":"tag-google","15":"tag-publishers","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-yield"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114976005398321237","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}