The only thing I can imagine is raising the minimum bid, but this would also result in less ads being shown (may still be overall beneficial but not a simple price increase).
There are some lawsuits that allege that Google was effectively cheating before then, by sort of manufacturing a shill bidder, with privileged access to everybody's bids, that turned it into something closer to a first-price auction (https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-ad-market-lawsu...). The quotes from within Google look pretty bad, e.g. one Googler allegedly wrote: "Doesn’t that undermine the whole idea of second price auctions? I.e., the assurance that you can bid the maximum you’re willing to pay with no negative consequence. But if the publisher manufactures a floor based on your bid to get you to pay more than the second price, this principle gets violated. It’ll transform the system into a 1st price auction where the bidder has a strong incentive to bid LESS than he’s willing to pay. (Only just enough to win.) I don’t think that’s desirable for either side in the long term."
Google... disputes this (https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/ag-pa...). I guess we'll see.
Example: On search results, if all bids are 0.01$, then it’s worth showing no ad, because it will annoy the customer to have low-relevance ads. But what is the ceiling? 0.10$? 1.00$? Sounds reasonable to have a ghost bid which represents the weight of customer fatigue.
I think the issue that the floor varies depending on google sets and there’s no visibility to how they do this.
If there’s only one bidder and the minimum price is $1 for one ad but $0.10 for another, why is that? It’s because google knows that one person can pay $1 while the other won’t.
It hasn’t been a proper auction for many years and is really just whatever google wants to charge. Because they have monopoly pricing power, customers don’t have any real alternatives to search ads.
It would be like if there was one magazine that had 90% of all readers and they charged whatever prices they wanted.
No impact on Google Search - is that still the case?
Even if that's true, it's still an auction, with real competition and bidding. And it's not only about price, it's also about the quality of the ad and the quality of the advertiser.
Yes, absolutely, if the court can sort through the unfathomably complex layers of rules of real-time ad auctions and show that Google did something illegal, they should be held accountable.
But isn't it bizarre how everyone's so hot and bothered by a possible 5% to 10% swindle, meanwhile:
- Questcor bought the rights to Acthar Gel, which treats infantile spasms, a rare form of childhood epilepsy. Questcor raised the price of a vial from $40 to $23,000.
- Valeant bought diabetes drug Glumetza and raised the price from $800 for a 90-day supply to over $10,000.
Here's an industry that routinely runs 1000% arbitrary price increases, with no competition, while holding people's lives hostage. Seems like we should be far more outraged about that than an unproven, speculative, 5% to 10% issue.
No it is not bizarre at all. Honestly with this reply my response would be "How much is Google paying you to say this", but sadly it is likely you are shilling for them for free.
Now, maybe you are only able to focus on one thing at a time, but I do believe the average person can hold multiple opinions over multiple subjects at the same time, and while on a site about technical issues, complain about the technology companies implementing bad policies.
Acthar Gel is prednisone with a claim of less side effects. Interesting it got approved in the early 1960s and was grandfathered in and didn't need to provide trials so many questions exist around if it's any different from prednisone anyways. Either way patents have expired and a generic maker can make this.
You can be mad at both, either or none. But companies being shielded by patents doesn't really apply here so it's hard to generate outrage
It’s clear from Facebook for example that they have dramatically lowered the bar for what can advertise recently.
Bidding against a larger pool of advertisers would increase the clearing price of the auction.
This former executive just testified under oath that they change the auction rules without telling advertisers, and do so in ways that increase Google's revenue specifically in order to cook their quarterly SEC filing numbers and mislead investors into thinking the ad business is healthy.
The executive also testified that they've fallen far behind Meta and Amazon on ad campaign quality and revenue.
edit: The bottom of this article explains one of the mechanisms they use. The top bidder gets second place, and the second bidder gets top place. This increases their ad revenue on average (tricks like this get them 5-10%, they think they could take 15% because of their monopoly power):
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/google-tweaks-ad-a...
So... tl;dr: Their ad business is based on fraud built on top of other fraud.
He didn't even talk about the pop-under / youtube fraud that was reported a few months ago.
Each of the following guarantees YouTube makes to advertisers is demonstrably false:
- video ads will be displayed prominently
- video ads will be displayed on high-quality, reputable sites
- audio will be played back
- if the ad is over 5 seconds there will be a skip button that the user can click on, and the ad impression doesn't cost anything if the user skips it. (In many cases, the ads are rendered with an occluded or missing skip button.)
The difference between their claims and reality is responsible for a mid double-digit percentage of YouTube's revenue.