How did Google buy, build, and bully its way to advertising dominance? Ari Paparo tells us in “Yield”

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“I set out to create the Moby Dick of adtech.”

I know it was said in jest during the recording of our podcast, but I think Ari Paparo was accurate in his literary self-assessment. 

Without question, the “Great White Whale” is an apropos metaphor for Google. And I’ll borrow from Melville here: If Ari’s heart were a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.

As a historical documentarian of Google’s rise and legal fallout as the preeminent ad tech goliath, Ari is clearly the Ishmael to the DOJ’s Ahab, telling us the story in vivid detail. 

And what a story it is. 

After a long and sordid legal quagmire, Google’s ad business has been harpooned, with the Department of Justice handing down sweeping remedies. Additional lawsuits are pending, so the saga is far from over.

While a complete breakup of Google’s advertising empire is unlikely, the government appears to have prevailed in its quest to stop its overreach. And despite the financial and business impacts on the Big G, the public’s perception of the search giant is clearly tarnished. We now know just how underhanded the manipulation was across Google’s buying and selling exchange, how they squeezed partners and bent the market to its will.

But there were unscrupulous players on all sides, as Ari pointed out. Some of that was reactionary, perhaps even predictable. It was all fruit of the poisonous tree. Or, more appropriately, rows of teeth in the whale’s mouth. 

“It wasn't just Google that was cheating,” he said. “They had a unique ability to cheat, because they were both on the buy and the sell side. But everyone else was cheating, too. The counterparties, in many cases, were doing shenanigans to raise the prices.”

In his new book, Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance, Ari takes us on a fascinating journey through the bowels of the burgeoning adtech world over the last two decades. He guides us through the high-stakes industry game that saw Google pit against “The Big Three” (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo) to control the advertising landscape, and how innovation – and shadowy tactics – helped them systematically dismantle the competition. 

The tale is stranger than fiction. And while one chapter has ended, we’re still roaming the turbulent waters, waiting to see what the whale does next. The intrigue goes beyond Silicon Valley's hallowed and often vulturous vestibules, weaving in Madison Avenue's misanthropic, profit-driven culture. It was like the new Gold Rush – and Ari had a front-row seat on the inside. 

After some dotcom-era dabbling, Ari joined the pioneering ad powerhouse Doubleclick, and was later shrink-wrapped into the 2008 Google acquisition. In our conversation, we discussed that transformation, and what the cultural shift was like. 

While he's not a character in the book, his proximity gave him deeper insight.

“I was part of the sale, and I ended up a Director of Product Management at Google, overseeing a lot of the products sold to advertisers and agencies,” he said. “And that was a really important transaction that kicks off the book, and I was just part of that.”

Here's a taste of our conversation:

A tale in three acts

Along with his career credentials as a former Googler, Ari is a curious explorer – an adtech guru who worked at the center of the industry and later leveraged his expertise to report the “goings on” for various news outlets. These days, he’s the CEO of Marketecture Media, a network of podcasts and events in the digital media business, where he continues to keep his fingers on the pulse. 

As Ari detailed in the podcast, the book is divided into three sections: The financialization of advertising, Google's march to dominance, and the legal challenges that followed. We discussed the profound invention of the ad exchange and how Google’s dual role as both a buyer and a seller allowed it to manipulate auctions.

The book is replete with examples of unethical practices – enough to make your head spin. But Ari also explained how the rise of reactive market pressures changed perceptions and created, shall we say, “interesting” responses. That included the advent of header bidding (one of many strange terms in the digital advertising lexicon), which allowed other parties to compete with Google on more even footing, further conflating the programmatic advertising landscape.

The ‘legal eagle’

Google’s power play remained in a black box – for a while. 

But as brands and advertisers became painfully aware of its shady practices, a cohort of unlikely bedfellows, including tech and communications giants like Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon (and publishing giants like News Corp, The Daily Mail, and Gannett), tried to shift Google’s course. As the book details, this alliance ultimately failed, leaving the question of whether a single company could control the destiny of media and journalism unanswered.

Enter the U.S. Department of Justice, which becomes a pivotal character in the story. As the last line of defense, the courts sought to unravel Google’s advertising empire and render its monopoly inert. During this landmark antitrust trial, Ari decided to camp out in the Virginia courthouse where the action was unfolding. He published a daily newsletter, which, in his words, got “snarky” at times. About midway through, the idea of crystallizing the saga as a book came to him.

“I said to myself, this is like a pretty good story, an emotional ‘people story’ about feeling gaslit and betrayed and having your power taken away from you as a publisher or as a monetization professional,” he recalled. “So it was born out of the testimony in the trial."

Spoiler alert: As we cover in the podcast, the DOJ is successful, and Google is currently being forced to dismantle its machine – or at least parts of it. And the drama is far from over as additional suits work their way through the courts. While the guilty verdict has ended in calls for a breakup of key business components and interests, Wall Street is still waiting for the judge’s gavel to fall on proposed remedies. The DOJ is even seeking a divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser as part of the regulatory case’s many remedies. 

In fact, this week, Perplexity – the popular AI answer engine with a keen focus on search – tendered an offer to purchase Chrome for the sweet sum of $34.5 billion, although Google claims it’s not for sale.

A people story

It would be easy to say this is a tale about tech, but it’s not. As Ari said, it's about people – and our delicate relationship with trust and transparency.

During the pod, Ari shared his experience of living through the antitrust trial and preparing to write a detailed book. Not only did he scour thousands of pages of documents in his research, but he also listened closely to the human toll of Google’s abuses, emphasizing the emotional impact on publishers and advertisers.

“This isn't just for me, the ad tech uber geek,” he said. “I really had to put it in the historical perspective with the real stories from the people that were involved.”

Maybe breaking up Google’s ad server and exchange is a logical next step. Opening its algorithms might also rebalance the equation. But as we discussed in the episode, the industry has already transformed, and AI is a big part of that. As traffic declines, zero-click searches rise, and users shift their preference to answer engines like ChatGPT, the advertising world is already playing by a different set of rules – and there’s no going back. 

During our pod recording, Ari offered some reflections on the future of journalism, the realities of “the open web,” and how consumers and advertisers might coexist in this new ecosystem of business models. As one of the leading minds in the field, he has a sense of where things are heading and how we have to adapt to this new paradigm.

“When we talk about what the old-fashioned definition of what the ‘open web’ means – free to consumers on the web, spiderable by search engines – there's no sugar coating it, that's on the decline,” he said. “And the ad-supported portion of that is also on the decline. And I don't think there's anything you can do about that. You have to look at other ways of supporting journalism, be it paid, nonprofit-supported, government-supported, or other things like that.”

The verdict

What can I say? I loved this book. 

It’s challenging, engaging, and beautifully crafted. It offers a well-balanced exchange of gripping narrative with technical exposition, giving you a deeper understanding of how the field of digital advertising functioned under Google's rule – and all the shenanigans they pulled. It’s a fascinating ride from cover to cover.

If you're a marketer, this book is for you. If you're a tech hawk that's obsessed with unpacking the cultural dysfunction of Silicon Valley in its mashup with Madison Avenue, this book is for you. And if you're a fan of documentary-style stories about unthinkable corporate profiteering and legal drama, this book is definitely for you.

I highly recommend it – and you can purchase your copy here.

“The Critic’s Corner” podcast with Ari Paparo

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