Thread by @Chronotope

I don't know crap about the number in the NYT article. Could believably be accurate, seems unlikely it is, as a construct is only sort of useful. The problem is Google aggregates journalistic gatekeeping functions but does not aggregate responsibility + Holy shit the ad tech...

I see a lot of people arguing current dominant state of Google is the news industry's fault, & yes, but not because news orgs could have built Google News (mby some individual members could have successfully). The problem was news orgs went online & didn't give a crap about ads

I say this a lot: journalism isn't broken but the business of journalism is. And that's the core issue, journalism orgs chose to not give a crap about how to monitize the web and gave up control of their entire methodology of making money online to third parties, mostly Google.

And they didn't learn either, most news startups don't innovate on the 'making money' part of their business until it was too late...

The true amount Google takes from the news industry as an ad tech tax on display is definitely a large number though, but one very hard to know. Consider this chain of events required to get an ad to your computer:

Agency puts ad on a Google distribution service.
Ad enters an exchange, that ad likely touches Google services at least once, perhaps twice.
The ad enters a Google ad server for publishers.
The ad is verified with Google ad metrics.
The ad is verified again be Google analytics.

It's a high likelihood that the majority of all ads on the web go through some version of this process. At each step Google gets a percent of the ad buy, a percent they never got before the news industry became reliant on them for digital display.

Between Google and the rest of ad tech, around 70% of every ad buy, the point of which, remember, is to get it to show up on a publisher site, goes to third parties, and not the publisher.

Google benefits from the complexity of this system because it is harder to see what's going on, and at every step there's another opportunity to take a cut. The more complex and obscured it becomes the more money Google makes.

This is a monopoly and that's a huge problem.

So does Google take money off of publishers that it shouldn't be allowed to?

Yes.

Is that number likely in the billions?

Yes.

Will we ever really know what that number is?

No.

That's a problem.

Google's position in control of the market is a problem. Is that partially publishers' fault for failing to give a crap about the business of the web? Sure.

But also ad driven journalism is important. It gives free access to excellent reporting. It funds a function important to democracy.

As a nation, we have real incentives to fix this problem.

Yes, publishers have fault in this, but that doesn't mean they should be doomed.

Google is a problem, and part of that problem is its very enormity. Google isn't just one monopoly it's multiple additive monopolies. That's what makes it hard to diagnose. There's a real need to resolve this, not just because of it impacts journalism, because it impacts everyone

Quibbling over a number is boring. Dealing w/the reasons we could never know the real number is important. A sustainable news industry is important. Understanding Google absolutely takes money it doesn't deserve from publishers and many others via monopolistic power is important.

Google is a critical problem in the digital ecosystem. Break it up. Provide tools to other industries to counter its power until you do.

If you're interested, I wrote up the mechanics of how regulators could break up Google. The biggest challenge was just how many things Google touches or has an overbearing market impact on startedwithatweet.substack.com/p/a-brief-list…