A Serf on Google's Farm

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 2, 2017 at 6:50:15 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Serf on Google's Farm
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Steve Schear.  DLH]
>
> A Serf on Google’s Farm
> By Josh Marshall
> Sep 1 2017
> <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm>
>
> An unintended effect of Google’s heavy-handed attempt to silence Barry Lynn and his Open Markets program at New 
> America has been to shine a really bright light both on Google’s monopoly power and the unrestrained and unlovely 
> ways they use it. Happily, Lynn’s group has landed on its feet, seemingly with plenty of new funding or maybe even 
> more than it had. I got a press release from them this evening. This seems to be their new site. I’ve already seen 
> other stories of Google bullying come out of the woodwork. Here’s one.
>
> I think it’s great that all this stuff is coming out. But what is more interesting to me than the instances of 
> bullying are the more workaday and seemingly benign mechanisms of Google’s power. If you have extreme power, when 
> things get dicey, you will tend to abuse that power. It’s not surprising. It’s human nature. What’s interesting and 
> important is the nature of the power itself and what undergirds it. Don’t get me wrong. The abuses are very 
> important. But extreme concentrations of power will almost always be abused. The temptations are too great. But what 
> is the nature of the power itself?
>
> Many people who know more than I do can describe different aspects of this story. But how Google affects and 
> dominates the publishing industry is something I know very, very well because I’ve lived with it for more than a 
> decade. To say I’ve “lived with it” makes it sound like a chronic disease or some huge burden. That would be a very 
> incomplete, misleading picture. Google has directly or indirectly driven millions of dollars of revenue to TPM over 
> more than a decade. Not only that, it’s provided services that are core parts of how we run TPM. So Google isn’t some 
> kind of thralldom we’ve lived under. It’s ubiquitous. In many ways, it makes what we do possible.
>
> What I’ve known for some time – but which became even more clear to me in my talk with Barry Lynn on Monday – is that 
> few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is 
> secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications 
> if it wanted to. So why rock the boat?
>
> I’m not worried about that for a few reasons: 1: We’ve refocused TPM toward much greater reliance on subscriptions. 
> So we’re less vulnerable. 2: Most people who know these mechanics don’t write. I do. 3: We’re small and I don’t think 
> Google cares enough to do anything to TPM. (If your subscription to Prime suddenly doubles in cost, you’ll know I was 
> wrong about this.) What I hope I can capture is that Google is in many ways a great thing for publishers. At least 
> it’s not a purely negative picture. If you’re a Star Trek fan you’ll understand the analogy. It’s a bit like being 
> assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, 
> you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.
>
> Let’s discuss the various ways we’re in business with Google.
>
> It all starts with “DFP”, a flavor of Doubleclick called DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), one of the early 
> “ad-serving companies” that Google purchased years ago. DFP actually started as GAM – Google Ad Manager. We were 
> chosen to be one of the beta-users. This was I think back in 2006 or 2007. What’s DFP? DFP is the application (or 
> software, or system – you could define it in different ways) that serves ads on TPM. I don’t know the exact market 
> penetration. But it’s the hugely dominant player in ad serving across the web. So on TPM, Google software manages the 
> serving of ads. Our ads all drive on Google’s roads.
>
> Then there’s AdExchange. That’s the part of Google that buys ad inventory. A huge amount of our ads come through ad 
> networks. AdExchange is far and away the largest of those for us – often accounting for around 15% of total revenues 
> every month – sometimes higher. So our largest single source of ad revenue is usually Google. To be clear that’s not 
> Google advertising itself but advertisers purchasing our ad space through Google. But every other ad we ever run runs 
> over Google’s ad serving system too. So Google software/service (DFP) runs the ad ecosystem on TPM. And the main 
> buyer within that ecosystem is another Google service (Adexchange).
>
> Then there’s Google Analytics. That’s the benchmark audience and traffic data service. How many unique visitors do we 
> have? How many page views do we serve each month? What’s the geographical distribution of our audience? That is all 
> collected through Google Analytics. Now, that’s not our only source of audience data. We have several services we use 
> for that in addition to our own internal systems. But we do use it for the big aggregate numbers and longterm record 
> keeping. In many ways it’s the canonical data people on the outside look at to see how big our audience is. Do we 
> have to share that data? No. Unless we want potential advertisers to see we have an audience.
>
> Next there’s search. Heard of that? There’s general search and then there’s Google News, a separate bucket of search. 
> Search tends not to be that important for us in part because we’ve never prioritized it and in part because as a site 
> focused on iterative news coverage what we produce tends to be highly ephemeral – at least in search terms. We don’t 
> publish a lot of evergreen stories. Still, search is important. For other publishers it’s the whole game.
>
> One additional Google implant is Gmail, which we use to provision our corporate email. The backbone of the 
> @talkingpointsmemo.com email addresses is gmail. Lots of companies now do this.
>
> So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience 
> data service, 4) all search, 5) our email.
>
> But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. Chrome is responsible for 
> 41% of our page views. Safari comes in second at 36%. But the Safari number is heavily driven by people using iOS 
> devices. On desktop Chrome is overwhelmingly dominant.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170902094756:5179BC6A-8FE5-11E7-AF29-B15B125DD622
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com