It’s been clear what Google’s plan is for the display advertising infrastructure. It wants to piece to piece an end to end system. The charitable view is the driving force behind this is an effort to bring simplicity to an overly complex landscape. The less charitable view is Google wants to dominate display the same way it dominates search. There’s probably some truth to both. Jay Sears, general manager of the ContextWeb Ad Exchange, has a not completely unbiased view in AdAge of the Google move to acquire Admeld. Sears doesn’t bemoan Google’s efforts to build its share of queries bid on exchanges.
My concern is just the opposite — that Google’s peers Microsoft, Yahoo and others — are not being diabolical enough. We need more diabolical liquidity, otherwise we will have a display advertising monopoly. And that’s only fun for one person at the party. Google has been building its dominance in display in plain sight yet few seem to understand how to counterbalance its cunning and impactful moves.
More in Media
Reuters and Time adopt bot-blocking whitelists to rein in AI crawlers
Reuters and Time adopt a ‘block-all’ AI bot strategy, part of a broader publisher move toward whitelist-only access.
Google’s AI opt-out leaves publishers with a choice they can’t safely use
The CMA has, on paper, given publishers a right to refuse AI in search. But because it’s opt-out, and Google is slow-walking the data needed to judge the impact, that right is barely usable, publishers say.
YouTube’s AI remix push exposes a looming reckoning for the creator economy
YouTube’s Gemini Omni integration has highlighted some of the major problems generative AI poses in the creator economy.