It has increasingly been a general consensus, and now a judge has confirmed that Google has a monopoly in advertising.
One of the things that I’ve been long noting is how impossible it is to have online advertising without using Google’s Adsense services. With my limited resources, I did look into whether or not it was possible to get out of using Adsense. After doing some searching, I didn’t find any real viable way forward on that front should I decide that Adsense isn’t for me.
So, it was very interesting to me when TechDirt was threatened with demonetization back in 2020, they looked into getting an alternative to the Adsense network. That quest, for them, carried on until 2021 when they eventually were forced to admit defeat and say that they couldn’t find a replacement. The reasons are all detailed, but they ran into two things in their search. First, most of the “alternative” ad networks simply piggybacked on the Adsense network. For another, the very few networks that didn’t served scammy advertising, inviting users to get scammed. That, obviously, wasn’t something that TechDirt wanted to promote in the first place.
The reason why we were interested in an alternative was because payouts for advertising has been steadily declining. The amount of traffic one could get back in the 2000’s to sustain your website was greatly less than what you need now. This despite the fact that server costs have been on the decrease for a very long time now with costs only recently starting to rise. For many years, I have been scratching my head at why clicks and ad impressions were delivering so poorly on revenues. Freezenet was delivering on the traffic, but Google was simply not paying out all that well any more. Thousands upon thousands of ad impressions were yielding mere pennies.
Well, the answer finally surfaced back in 2022 when a lawsuit against Google was filed over its Adtech policies. As it turned out, Google was suppressing publisher revenues by 40%. To put this into perspective, if I had a 40% increase in payouts, I wouldn’t still be hoping to pay for server costs. I would be able to scrounge up small amounts of money for financially investing in the site. Things like advertising and contracting out for additional news coverage and so on. Things that would help my site grow, really (insert shameless plug of our Patreon page here).
Now, to be fair, Google pulling back ad revenue from publishers isn’t the only threat to smaller websites like Freezenet. Last year, Google also unveiled Google Overview, an AI that summarizes the content on different webpages and presents it on the top of search results. This negates the reasons for users to click on the different webpages by people who have been working hard at providing that content to you and just allows Google to not deliver as much traffic to those sites.
In the months since the unveiling, Freezenet’s traffic had been steadily dropping as the AI Overview has been slamming Freezenet’s traffic. I sincerely doubt that I’m alone on that one. Today, the site gets about 100 views on a good day – sometimes averaging about 60 to 80 views. A far cry from what we used to get which is about 250 to 400 views per day and sometimes hitting 1,000 views in a 24 hour period. With our typical world class coverage for the Canadian election, there has been a bit of an uptick where the average has been around 70-100, but it’s hard to say whether or not that would last once the election is over.
Either way, Freezenet has been dealt a one two punch between the siphoning off of ad revenue and the undercutting of our traffic.
Well, with the lawsuit against Google over it’s advertising monopoly, we were, of course, very interested observers. This with the prospect of the possibility that one of our problems might finally be getting handled. The trial moved ahead in 2024 over these allegations. Later on in November, the Canadian Competition Bureau also challenged Google over its monopolistic practices in advertising.
More recently, we are seeing a result of the US litigation. A judge has ruled that Google has a monopoly in advertising online. From the BBC:
A US judge has ruled tech giant Google has a monopoly in online advertising technology.
The US Department of Justice, along with 17 US states, sued Google, arguing the tech giant was illegally dominating the technology which determines which adverts should be placed online and where.
This is the second antitrust case Google has lost in a year, after it was ruled the company also had a monopoly on online search.
Google said it would appeal against the decision.
“Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective,” the firm’s head of regulatory affairs Lee-Ann Mulholland said.
US district judge Leonie Brinkema said in the ruling Google had “wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts” which enabled it to “acquire and maintain monopoly power” in the market.
“This exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” she said.
Obviously, the case isn’t over, but even the judge acknowledged that publishers (Freezenet is one such publisher) got harmed in all of this. It’s yet another instance where we got vindicated in all of this. We knew full well that we got harmed over the years and the judge basically confirmed that as far as we are concerned.
Still, this appeals process is going to take more time, and this case is likely to take years still, but at least it’s going in a relatively positive direction. We’ll continue to keep tabs on this whole situation as it unfolds. This as we continue to draw on our pure resilience to stay afloat in the interim.
