Waterfall of Lawsuits
Google’s SSP practices during the waterfall-to-header-bidding transition are the lawsuit gift that keeps giving. In addition to the DOJ trial (Google lost) and the Texas trial (which still hasn’t started), now there’s OpenX v. Google.
The SSP filed a lawsuit against Google on Monday, alleging that the company’s anticompetitive practices forced OpenX to shut down its ad server in 2019 and led to the SSP having a “rough stretch.”
The lawsuit repeats many of the DOJ’s claims against Google that were part of the antitrust lawsuit, which Google lost, so OpenX knows many of its allegations have already been proven in court.
For example, OpenX mentions that Google could enter a bid after seeing all the bids from rival SSPs, that Google restricted access to AdWords demand and that publishers could not control their floor prices at the exchange level.
OpenX is asking for damages from Google, saying that without the anticompetitive practices, the SSP would have been on a much different path.
Good-Faith Bots
Remember last month when Cloudflare said it was going to block AI bots by default and implement a pay-per-crawl model?
It sounded almost too good to be true – and, apparently, it was.
Cloudflare found “stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity,” including bots that constantly change autonomous system numbers and user agents to hide their crawling activity.
Perplexity has also been disregarding robots.txt files, which are what Cloudflare describes as a code of conduct for bots.
After receiving a number of complaints from customers regarding Perplexity’s scraping habits, Cloudflare tested its system by creating several new test websites with strict directives in the robots.txt files to disallow any form of bot access.
The result? Perplexity was “still providing detailed information regarding the exact content hosted on each of these restricted domains,” Cloudflare claims.
Cloudflare is offering tools for bot management and working with technical and policy experts “to establish clear and measurable principles that well-meaning bot operators should abide by.”
Of course, that sort of industrywide standard is exactly what robots.txt is supposed to be. And we can see how well that’s worked out.
Ad Spend Adds Up
Everyone gripes about ads, but they apparently prop up a large chunk of the US economy.
Advertising supported almost a quarter of America’s total economic output last year, according to a study by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The study was commissioned by The Advertising Coalition, an alliance between the ANA, the 4As, NAB, AAF, the News/Media Alliance and other advertising and media organizations.
The study also examined how US ad spend drives economic activity, both directly and indirectly. It found brands spent $491 billion on advertising last year, which stimulated $3.5 trillion in direct sales activity and another $2.8 trillion in indirect sales for advertisers’ downstream suppliers, including agencies and ad tech.
The sum of US ad spend and associated sales activity was $10.4 trillion last year, or about 22% of the US economy’s $47.5 trillion total output.
Advertising is also an employment driver, the study claims. Ads supported 29 million jobs last year, or 18.3% of the total US workforce.
And despite perceptions that ad agencies and ad tech are coastal industries, the Midwest and the South were well represented among the 17 states that saw the most economic activity from advertising.
But Wait! There’s More!
Amazon is shutting down its Wondery podcast studio. [Bloomberg]
Investment firm H.I.G. Capital acquires Kantar Media. [PR Newswire]
Remember how Google was going to deprecate all of its goo.gl links? Turns out, maybe not. [The Verge]
Apple CEO Tim Cook held an hourlong all-hands pep talk with employees to reassure them about the company’s latecomer status in the AI race. [Bloomberg]
You’re Hired!
Canela Media hires José Molina as chief financial officer. [release]
Marketing agency Butler/Till appoints Manny Puentes as its first chief product officer. [release]
