Ari Paparo is the author of the new book Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance. He has worked as an executive at DoubleClick and at Google, and is now the CEO of Marketecture Media. He lives in New York.
Q: What inspired you to write Yield, and how did your experiences working for Google affect the writing of the book?
A: I've been deeply immersed in the advertising technology sector for over 20 years, and it never struck me as a sexy, exciting topic for a book. Then in 2024 the long-running antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice was going to trial in Virginia, and I thought to myself, "You'd be crazy not to go there and watch the proceedings."
The natural drama of any court battle was a bit inspiring to me, and I realized that the story was not so much about technology, but more about the 15+ year battle between traditional publishing and the giant, sometimes benevolent and sometimes aggressive dictator known as Google.
Within three months of the trial ending I had the book written, having interviewed 60+ people involved in the history, and reviewed what must have been a thousand court documents.
Q: The writer Alex Kantrowitz called the book “a riveting exposé of power, technology, and the battle for control of the digital economy.” What do you think of that description?
A: I hope it's riveting! I tried to tell the story through the eyes of the people involved rather than just the tech. There are stories of gaslighting and deception. There are people who fought Google and won, and others whose businesses were ultimately crushed. There are secret deals, like the alliance between Google and Facebook. The whole thing is pretty dramatic.
Q: What do you see looking ahead for Google?
A: Google is under attack from both technology trends and the legal system. The emergence of AI as a replacement for search is happening extraordinarily quickly and that threat is right at the heart of the company. Recent stats put the market share of non-Google AI searches at almost 5 percent, which is a huge change in the power dynamics.
Meanwhile, on the legal side you have two different federal judges evaluating whether to force spin-outs of important assets.
In the case I write about, Judge Brinkema is being asked to force the divestiture of the major components of Google's non-search advertising business, while in the D.C. case, Judge Mehta is considering a spin-out of the Chrome browser. All of these changes touch on the core of what the company actually is, and how they will compete in the next decade.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Yield has two meanings.
First, in the same way the airline business tries to sell every single seat on a plane, there's a science around maximizing the "yield" of every possible ad slot on a website or app.
The work that publishers do to increase their ad yield is all based around the technology that Google bought from DoubleClick, then used to bully media companies to do their bidding.
The second meaning is the more common one, that the parties to this fight spent decades pushing against each other’s interests trying to gain advantage.
When Google would not allow publishers to manage their yield in the way they wanted, the publishers teamed up and created work-arounds. Then Google built products to make those work arounds less relevant, and publishers pushed back in different ways. This cat-and-mouse game is a big part of the story I'm telling.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My day job is as a podcaster and commentator about the advertising industry at Marketecture Media. We think of ourselves as "Barstool Sports for Advertising."
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Advertising fuels everything around us. While many publications are moving to paywalls, that revenue makes up a small minority of what pays for journalism and other quality content. I hope people read the book to get a sense of how those ad dollars work and how hard it is for publishers to survive in this complex world dominated by tech giants.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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