Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the tentpoles that kick off that final stretch of Q4 spanning Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this Black Friday/Cyber Monday combo was not as record-setting as in years past, according to Adobe and others who track sales data. There are many reasons behind this change. Not only has the pandemic […]
First-price auctions are coming to Google AdSense. The change will go into effect later this year, Google shared in a blog post on Thursday. Google Ad Manager and AdMob have already switched to a first-price auction. Though not nearly as momentous as when Google flipped the switch for Ad Manager, the AdSense change signals that […]
From Ohio to DC and from London to Paris, regulators and consumer privacy advocates are sharpening their pencils and their knives. If you don’t have time to keep track of all the actions underway, the biggest takeaway is not to expect a quiet summer. Regulators are increasingly convinced that scaled data collection can harm competition. […]
No more laissez-faire. Google has agreed to pay a $268 million fine and make changes to its advertising business to settle a precedent-setting anticompetition case in France. The settlement, announced on Monday, was reached with the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), France’s competition authority, and marks the first time that an antitrust regulator has been […]
The European Commission verified in writing on Friday that Google’s use of data to fuel its ad tech business is a focus of its ongoing antitrust investigation. And here’s the kicker: “Google’s proposals to deprecate third-party cookies are within the scope.” As Brussels-based journalist Alexander Fanta highlighted on Twitter, this could mean by extension that […]
Google’s lack of transparency has long frustrated publishers and independent ad tech companies, and its clandestine program “Project Bernanke” has only confirmed their suspicions that Google uses learnings from its auction to benefit itself. Ad tech insiders met the allegations that Google secretly fed publisher ad server data into its buying systems to gain market […]
Google’s legal team just got even busier. On Thursday, less than 24 hours after Google was hit with an antitrust lawsuit digging into its ad tech business, a bipartisan coalition of 38 states and territories served up yet another suit, this one focused on alleged antitrust violations related to Google’s alleged monopoly over the search […]
The multistate antitrust lawsuit against Google that dropped on Wednesday evening is so squarely focused on ad tech that the term “header bidding” shows up more than 110 times. The suit details alleged anticompetitive sins related to the way in which Google runs its multibillion-dollar online advertising business, including the claim that Google colluded with […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by John Donahue, CEO and co-founder of WLxJS. The Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Google alleges that the search giant created and subsequently abused a monopolistic position in, well, search. And […]
As an anti-tracking company and the creator of a privacy extension for the web, you’d think Ghostery would be all about the elimination of third-party cookies. But Jeremy Tillman, president of Ghostery, is wary of Google’s motivation for phasing out third-party tracking in Chrome. “You have to think about the second-order effects of these types […]
