Google Ad Manager. Picture: Shutterstock/IB Photography
Five major US publishers have filed lawsuits against Google claiming its “deceptive and manipulative” adtech practices seriously limited their potential revenue.
Rolling Stone owner Penske Media Corporation (plus its subsidiary She Media), Conde Nast owner Advance Publications, The Verge owner Vox Media, local newspaper giant McClatchy, and The Atlantic have all filed cases against Google in the past week.
The actions come after the US Justice Department successfully sued Google for violating antitrust law by monopolising digital advertising markets, harming “Google’s publishing customers” as well as consumers. A ruling on what Google can be made to do to restore competition is expected this year.
The publisher lawsuits allege that Google used its dominance over ad servers and ad exchanges to force publishers into its ecosystem, stifle competition and drive down online prices.
They say Google could see rivals’ bids through its ad exchange before submitting its own, allowing it to keep prices deliberately low.
A Google spokesperson said in response to the complaints: “These allegations are meritless. Advertisers and publishers have many choices and when they choose Google’s ad tech tools it’s because they are effective, affordable and easy to use.”
The Atlantic claimed in its lawsuit that publishers had to use Google’s ad server DFP in order to be able to use its dominant ad exchange AdX.
The Atlantic’s filing said Google would “trade on inside information and [buy] The Atlantic’s inventory on the cheap” and that it “makes it difficult for publishers to solicit competitive bids from rival exchanges, while at the same time rigging AdX’s bids by trading on inside information from DFP”.
Until 2019 publishers would often set higher minimum prices for Google’s demand because, they believed, the tech giant would use the advantageous data it had from across its tools to bid potentially just a penny higher than any non-Google bid.
In 2019 Google introduced unified pricing, meaning publishers had to sell to Google and its competitors for the same price. This resulted in publishers reporting lower yield than they might have done previously.
Google removed unified pricing and reintroduced the ability for publishers to set different ad pricing on its products in December after proposing to do so as one of its suggested remedies in the antitrust ruling against it.
According to The New York Post , The Atlantic complaint also detailed a secret internal project that allegedly used bid-level data to underpay publishers and ultimately subsidise losing bids and crowd out rival ad exchanges.
Internal analysis cited in the complaint found the project could impact a publisher’s revenue by more than 40%.
McClatchy, owner of 30 US newsrooms including the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star, said in its lawsuit that Google “rigged” the market so publishers needed to use its ad server to reach major advertisers.
McClatchy chief executive Tony Hunter said the publisher filed the case to challenge “what we believe are long-standing monopolistic practices in the advertising technology marketplace”.
- Vox Media’s lawsuit states
- “Absent Google’s conduct, Vox Media would be able to make available even more, higher quality impressions for purchase on Vox Media’s webpages and create more high-quality, premium journalism.”
Vox Media head of communications Lauren Starke said in a statement: “Vox Media’s high-quality journalism is funded by our ability to sell digital advertising against our content, and by engaging in over a decade of anticompetitive and unlawful behavior, Google has deprived Vox Media of this revenue.
“In filing this lawsuit, we are seeking monetary damages and an end to Google’s deceptive and manipulative practices in order to protect our ability to continue investing in the trusted content that our audience relies upon.”
Penske-owned She Media said its network of lifestyle publishers are vulnerable to Google’s conduct because they are so reliant on digital advertising.
A group of publishers including the Daily Mail and Gannett have already successfully won a partial summary judgment in a similar case against Google due to the Justice Department’s antitrust trial findings that the tech giant has an adtech monopoly.
Gannett chief executive Mike Reed said in October this was a “major development in the broader antitrust battle” against Google.
Google attempt to dismiss Penske AI Overviews lawsuit
Penske Media has separately sued Google over the use of its content in AI summaries at the top of search results, saying this was affecting traffic and revenue. It also complained that it is unable to block Google from using its content in AI Overviews while still appearing normally in search results.
Google is attempting to dismiss the case with a motion filed on Monday , in which it argued: “Google is not obligated to include PMC’s or any other publisher’s content in its search engine. Having chosen to do so, Google is free to set the terms on which it will engage with PMC and other publishers.”
It added: “Publishers maintain discretion over which portions of their websites are available to be indexed on Google and can opt out of indexing entirely. Publishers who allow Google to index their sites do so not because of coercion, but because of the visibility and discoverability benefits indexing provides.”
Google also claimed that AI Overviews are “not a separate product from Google’s general search engine” and that displaying them “does not deprive users of alternatives or require them to use it to access other results.
“Providing users with the choice to use an additional feature cannot be coercive tying,” referring to a business practice in which the sale of one product is tied to that of another.
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