Comment by edg5000
4 hours ago
The article seems to distingish ads from ad tech, stating ads bring in a lot of revenue, but ad tech not. Kinda confused about what the difference is.
4 hours ago
The article seems to distingish ads from ad tech, stating ads bring in a lot of revenue, but ad tech not. Kinda confused about what the difference is.
Ok, so "ad tech" is basically situations where someone pays you to run their ad network, like a newspaper or a magazine or something who sells their own ads to people. Google used to call this "Doubleclick for Publishers" (DFP) and don't anymore to be confusing, but I am going to use the old names so it is easier to tell you what each part of the business does.
When someone sells "ads" they are selling the placement itself. When advertisers buy this, they use "AdWords" or "Doubleclick for Advertisers".
Many DFP users got a checkbox one day permitting Google to sell ads and checked this. As a result, Google was able to outcompete _every_ ad publisher, and now "ad tech" doesn't make money buy "ads" does.
Google is right that they cannot separate them, but is lying about why: Neither unit would be profitable without the monopoly, because quite frankly if someone else could sell ads without sucking a ton of money off the top to make a failing self-driving car company, they would and simply win on price.
I agree it doesn't make sense. How are they supposed to make money from ads without ad tech? They're intimately intertwined.