Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/20/the_google_monopoly/
Google - the world's first firewalled monopoly
Pricing power goes virtual
Posted in On-Prem, 20th November 2008 18:42 GMT
Antitrust 2.0 Why did Google leave outgoing Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang heartbroken at the search engine altar? If you believe the words chief ad broker and CEO Eric Schmidt funneled through The New York Times, Google chafed at the prospect of winning a Department of Justice (DoJ) antitrust suit.
"We canceled the deal with about one hour to go before a lawsuit was going to be filed against our deal," Schmidt said. "We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won."
But surely, when Schmidt speaks of costs, he's not concerned with paying his lawyers. A monopoly-expanding ad pact with Jerry Yang and Yahoo! would bring Google hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If the company was convinced of an antitrust triumph, legal fees were a drop in the bucket.
As head Mountain View lawyer David Drummond tells it, a long legal battle could damage relationships with Google advertisers - many of whom opposed the Yahoo! marriage. But the costs are even greater: An antitrust trial would finally give the world a window into Google's black box of an ad engine.
The genius of the Mountain View money machine is that no one knows how it works.
The auction that isn't
Even in the face of a probing DoJ, Google insists that its ad platform is an auction - that advertisers set their own prices. But the AdWords auction is hardly a free market. You can't bid your way to the top of Google's search results page. Each bid is crunched by algorithms hidden inside the Google chocolate factory. Ad placement depends on ever-changing Google math that's not only outside the advertiser's control - it's outside the advertiser's line of sight.
AdWords is an auction where you don't know the rules, the rules are always shifting, and you don't quite understand what you're bidding for. Ultimately, you're at the mercy of the auction house. AdWords is famous for The Google Slap, where search ads suddenly vanish from results pages as Mountain View decides your current bid isn't worthy.
Google's ad engine is so far from an eBay-style bid-off, even Google admits that advertisers can't wrap their heads around it. "We have seen some large advertisers complain [about the Yahoo! ad pact]," Eric Schmidt said during the company's third quarter earnings call. "In my view, many of the complaints are based on the fact that people do not understand how the auctions really work."
This would seem to undermine Google's contention that advertisers are in control. As telco-backed blogger Scott Cleland has asked: If advertisers don't understand the auction, is it really an auction?
The truth is that if you want a particular ad placement, you're forced to pay whatever Google decides you should pay. And since Google controls at least sixty per cent of the search market, turning to a competitor isn't the best of options.
Later in that earnings call, Google senior vice president Jonathan "Perfect Ad" Rosenberg was asked whether the average cost per ad click had risen during the third quarter. He wouldn't say. But he seemed to indicate that it had - and that demand hasn't slowed.
"Our experience is advertisers are willing to take all the clicks we can give them at the current CPC [cost per click] - even in tough times," he said. "We think that will continue to be true because nobody wants to turn away a customer."
Does that sound like pricing power?
A question of quality...
In early September, Google revamped its ad platform, rolling out several changes that expanded its advertising coverage, tossing more ads onto more pages.
During the third quarter, a time when so many other companies were feeling the heat of The Meltdown, Google's paid ad clicks jumped 18 per cent over the previous year. And revenue soared 31 per cent. Considering that advertising drives all but a thin slice of its revenue, Google didn't just expand coverage. It sparked a significant price increase - whether Jonathan Rosenberg admits it or not.
Google will tell you those AdWords changes were "quality improvements," meant to fill search pages with ads that netizens are more likely to enjoy clicking on. On some level, that's probably true. But this is ad quality as Google sees it. Not as the advertiser sees it. And Google has improved it in a way that makes the company more money.
The trick here is that Google can so easily raise prices while claiming it doesn't. Because the system is set up as an auction, Schmidt and crew can honestly say that advertisers bid for placements. But at the same time, the company can boost the platform-wide cost per click with a spin of that algorithmic dial.
And since the system is a black box, it can spin without scrutiny. It's not just that the algorithms are top secret. All the bids are top secret too. The monopoly is hidden behind the firewall. Individual advertisers may complain they can't get traffic without exorbitant bids. But Google can always cry quality. And we have no way of knowing what that means.
Yes, Google gives advertisers a certain amount of insight into when their ads are posted, supplying long lists of keyword searches and third-party sites serving up impressions. But the system is so complex, its reach so vast, separating the Google signal from the advertiser noise is an impossibility - whether you're a newbie or the most clever of seasoned users.
It's not that an antitrust suit would suddenly clarify things for advertisers. The nature of the system is that it's far too complex for Joe The Advertiser to grasp - even with algorithms in hand. But if Google were forced to open its virtual books, we would know whether it's limiting impressions for advertisers low on the totem pole, creating a kind of artificial scarcity where the prices are cheap. And we would know just how much the Mountain Viewers can juice revenues with a few algorithmic tweaks.
If the DoJ had launched an antitrust suit over Google's ad pact with Yahoo!, it may have undermined more than just the ad pact with Yahoo! So Eric Schmidt was right: the potential costs were enormous. ®