| Title | Google Gamed its Ad Auction System to Favor its Own Ads, Generated $213 Million | |
| Date | Wednesday April 14 2021, @06:39AM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the apple-in-cider-says dept. | ||
Google gamed its ad auction system to favor its own ads, generated $213 million:
Google used a secret program called "Bernanke" that used historical bidding data to give its ad-buying system a major advantage over its rivals, an antitrust lawsuit filing claims, a program that earned the company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
[...] The antitrust lawsuit centers around how Google's ownership of a platform for selling online advertising, as well as its position as an ad buyer for its own properties, was a problem. By being both an owner and a client, Google was thought to be able to game the system due to having access to data that ad buyers wouldn't necessarily receive.
Google allegedly used this data from publisher ad servers to guide ad buyers to a price they would have to pay to secure a specific ad placement. This knowledge and usage was effectively insider trading to the states, as Google could feasibly pay less to publishers, as well as having a natural advantage over third-party ad-buying systems.
Project Bernanke specifically was a system that used data from historical bids made in Google Ads, massaging the bids of its clients to increase the possibility it will win an advertising auction. This put rival systems at a bigger disadvantage.
In terms of how important it was to Google, an internal presentation from 2013 shows Project Bernanke was anticipated to generate $230 million in revenue for that year alone.
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printed from SoylentNews, Google Gamed its Ad Auction System to Favor its Own Ads, Generated $213 Million on 2024-04-24 08:40:15