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How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else
The DOJ wants to show Google can do this because it has a monopoly.
According to emails presented in court, Google executives wondered whether the 20 percent fee their AdX exchange charged for facilitating transactions was sustainable and worried about how they’d continue to justify it. In one 2018 email,responding to another executive’s question about disclosing Google’s buy-side fee and how much it should be, LaSala noted that the fee for buying and selling ads “holds today not because there is 20% of value in comparing 2 bids to one another, but because it comes with unique demand via AdWords that is not available any other way.” He said he believed “a sell-side rev share should probably top out at 10%” for the open auction and that the “unique demand” from Google Ads was “the only reason we can sustain 20%.” As Tom Kershaw, the former chief technology officer at rival ad exchange Rubicon, testified earlier in the day, “I have the option to starve to death.
Or read this on The Verge
