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- I Wrote a Book: Yield
I wrote a book about Google, ad tech, antitrust, and journalism
Tl;dr: I have my first book coming out this Summer called Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied its Way to Advertising Dominance. You should pre-order it now.
Longer version
I had been toying with writing a book for years. When you’re forced to write a 1,000 word newsletter every week you get the sense that it can’t really be that much harder, right? Well the hardest part is figuring out what to write about. The idea that was obvious, and which others often suggested to me, was a “history of ad tech” type thing. …. sorry I fell asleep just thinking about it.
Then last September I spent three weeks covering the Google ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia for our sister publication, The Monopoly Report. The DOJ’s case struck me as a cross between the aforementioned “history of ad tech” and the Seinfeld finale, bringing up every dubious thing Google did for two decades in their march to dominance.
The thing was, the stories that people told on the stand weren’t boring. They were filled with emotion and sometimes anger. Steph Layser of News Corp (now at Amazon) told of being gaslit. Tim Cadogan of OpenX (now at GoFundMe) told of having to fire 200 people when the DV360 algo changed. The trial ultimately told the story of publishers and entrepreneurs having their independence stripped from them by a voracious bully, Google. Allegedly. Or it was alleged, until Judge Brinkema said it was in fact.
So I wrote a book, and it’s coming out in August. You can pre-order it, and I’d really appreciate it if you did:
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What’s the book about?
The book tells the story of how digital advertising got transformed by the invention of the ad exchange, how Google used its DoubleClick acquisition to corner that market, and how publishers, using both technology and the law, fought back. I interviewed over 60 people, and reviewed maybe 1,000 pages of documents. The footnotes are 20+ pages. And yes, my millennial friends, there will be an audio book.
Is this an anti-Google book?
The feeling of helplessness and loss among the “open web” publishing world is certainly not entirely Google’s fault, or more specifically the fault of Google’s actions in the ad tech world. In a sign of how bad things have been for publishers, its hard to narrow down which of the multiple mega-trends that have broken against them has had the biggest effect. The growth of social apps. The decline in trust in the media. The loss of cookies. AI. Just try to narrow it down!
But Google is right in the middle of it, and they have culpability.
I’ve been asked a lot about whether Google is "evil” within the scope of the story, and I think its more of a tragedy than anything else. Google did what Google does. They entered a market, then ruthlessly optimized it to their own benefit. The tragedy comes from the way the publishers were caught in the middle, ending up like sharecroppers on Google’s land, rather than paying customers and partners. And from the internal documents and interviews, it feels like Google got to this position in such a slow and gradual way that it was hard to even tell it was happening inside the company.
What’s the call to action?
I hope you all enjoy it. It is called Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied its Way to Advertising Dominance. You can read more at aripaparo.com/yield-the-book.
Reading list
MNTN IPO! Tom Triscari did a good analysis on his newsletter (link) estimating current media spend ~$600 million and 40% take rates.
NYPost web traffic dropped from 125 million to 85 million/month in one year, down 32%due to search algo changes (link)
Trade Org News Media Alliance came out hard against AI Mode, calling it “theft” (link)
ChatGPT traffic has nearly doubled this year to publishers (link)
BI cutting 21% of staff (link)
WPP Media (formerly GroupM) launches as a “fully integrated, AI-powered media company” (link)
Creatify (presented at Marketecture Live!) raises $15.5m Series A (link)
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