Blue Monday

Blue Monday

It was the worst news possible for Google. What’s next for the company which dominates the digital ad space? Perhaps history can tell us.

Google is a Monopoly, U.S. Court Rules

Historians might remember the time that Microsoft decided to bundle its Internet Explorer browser with Windows. Prior to that, there were a handful of third-party browsers — Opera, Netscape Navigator — but Microsoft put its then-new Internet Explorer in every install of Windows.

The result: IE became the dominant browser.

The other thing that happened was that put the company on the radar of regulators. And in 1998, the American justice department and 20 states filed a lawsuit against the company for monopolistic practices.

It was… messy.

Bill Gates was called "evasive and nonresponsive" at his deposition. He argued over the definitions of words like "ask", and "we". He said the phrase “I don't recall” so many times it made the presiding judge laugh.

In one case, Microsoft submitted a video showing how fast and easy it was for users to install Netscape onto their PCs. But the government submitted its own video, which showed that Microsoft had edited out a long and complex part of the process. A company VP eventually conceded they’d falsified the video.

Microsoft lost its case.

The Google decision

Google’s anti-trust case, which has been going on since last fall, didn’t really surface any eye-popping gotcha moments like those, but apparently, it didn’t need any.

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that Google unlawfully held a monopoly in the online search and ad market.

In particular, the court called out the payments Google makes to companies like Apple to be the default search engine on those devices. Those are huge payments, by the way. The deal Apple has with Google provides it 17% of its profits.

Will Microsoft’s end be a guide?

If history is any guide, the relief could be divisive.

After Microsoft lost its case, the Court ordered a breakup of Microsoft into two separate units: One for its Windows operating system, the other for everything else.

Microsoft appealed and won.

But it didn’t win on the merits of the ruling; rather, on a technicality. The judge, it seemed, had discussed the case with news media while it was still in progress, violating a code of conduct.

So while the main finding still stood — Microsoft did bad things — the break-up order was overturned. In the end, all Microsoft had to do was to agree to share its APIs with third-party companies and appoint an independent panel of reviewers to monitor that for five years.

Many industry watchers at the time said that Microsoft had won, even though it had lost.

What’s next?

Everyone now moves to the penalty phase, where the judge will decide how to remedy the monopoly.

What exactly that looks like is anyone’s guess. It could order the cancellation of that lucrative Google/Apple deal. It could require Google to split its browser and operating system.

And in just over a month, Google will be back in court for a different antitrust trial, this one focussing on its ads platform. The American justice department says, in that case, Google has an illegal dominance in the digital ad market, allegedly boosting its revenue while raising costs for advertisers.

You May Have Paid for Your Competitor’s Google Ads

If you run Google Ads, you might have noticed that the reporting side of the platform was down for several days at the start of this month (and one important part of it is still down).

Now, we have more details on what caused that outage, and it ain’t pretty.

A Glaring Glitch in the Matrix

Turns out, it wasn’t a bug, or scheduled maintenance — instead, Google turned the reporting functionality off manually after it was discovered to be surfacing confidential information. Specifically, some advertisers reported they could see the ad performance data of their direct competitors by searching for their product titles. (And, presumably, their competitors could see their data.)

This meant that some advertisers unknowingly ran ads for their competitors.

Here’s SEO professional Greg Finn on the Search Engine Roundtable podcast:

Refunds coming. But will that be enough?

Google did acknowledge the issue, saying:

A Google spokesperson said they’d be contacting all affected advertisers soon, and will hand out credits in compensation, though it’s hard to put a value on revenue loss if your competitors were able to see how your product ads perform.

This afternoon, Google reported that most reports were back up, with the exception of some competitive metrics. It also said it has removed the incorrect data from affected accounts.

Meta is Removing Detailed Targeting Exclusions

More control is being taken from the hands of media buyers.

Meta is removing detailed targeting exclusions for all new campaigns going forward. These exclusions let advertisers remove cohorts from their campaigns based on demographics, interests, or behaviours.

For instance, you could run ads to everyone interested in shoes, but exclude people who are interested in high-end fashion.

Meta says its AI knows better, and that costs per conversion go down when those exclusions are removed.

The company says it’ll take a couple of months to drop this in all accounts, and that rollout actually started a couple of weeks ago.

If your campaigns already had these exclusions set up before your account gets hit with this, those settings will still work until the end of January.

Subterfuge was afoot

Getting to this point was sort of weird.

It doesn’t affect custom audiences

One important note: Meta is leaving in place the ability to exclude custom audiences. This, for instance, is what lets marketers keep ads away from people who’ve already bought the product being advertised.

Netflix Slashes Ad Prices Again

Netflix is lowering its ad prices again, with CPMs (cost per thousand views) now ranging between $20 and $30 for some inventory, according to ad buyers who spoke with the streamer in July.

Prices have been falling

Since announcing its plan to sell ads nearly two years ago, Netflix's ad rates have been dropping significantly. Initial CPMs were as high as $65 in 2022, but have since fallen to the current range of $20-$30.

The reduced ad prices make Netflix more competitive with rivals like Amazon's Prime Video, which launched its ad tier earlier this year with CPMs starting at $26.

Despite having a smaller ad-supported audience than some competitors, Netflix still boasts the second-largest streaming viewership in the U.S. behind YouTube.

Push into programmatic

The lower prices coincide with Netflix's push into programmatic advertising.

The streamer is partnering with adtech firms like The Trade Desk, Google's Display & Video 360, and Magnite to test its new ad server.

Apple Will Let Users Block Your Overlays and Videos

Is Apple a villain or a hero? That depends on who you ask. Its customers might tell you its the hero, after crippling the ability for apps to track their behaviour online. Advertisers, well, you can probably guess their feeling on that.

Apple’s moves a few years ago to block tracking shook up the digital ad space. Meta said it lost at least $10 billion because of it.

Now, Apple is poised to bring one more good-for-users/bad-for-marketers tool to their devices: something it calls Distraction Control.

Tap to remove

It works in Apple’s Safari browser, and users just need to tap the screen to remove content blocks. Some of these blocks are used by marketers — auto-playing videos and content overlays like newsletter subscription signups.

This feature has just started beta testing with developers. These choices hold over for future visits to the site, unless some content in that block changes, then that block will come back again.

More than an ad blocker

To be clear, this is not an ad blocker. You’ll need an extension like 1Blocker for that. Instead, this is similar to what the newish Arc browser calls Boosts.

Yelp to Developers: Four Days to Pay Up, or Get Lost

That nice little third-party Yelp tool you use to manage your reviews or keep your page updated might be turning off soon — and you can blame Elon Musk for it.

Yelp recently shifted indie platform developers to paid accounts, saying they were using too much of the system’s resources. And worse, it only gave the developers four days’ notice.

Developers were given a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting at $229 for just 1,000 API calls per day. Currently, that’s priced at less than $10 for those 1,000 calls.

This, of course, sparked outrage among developers.

Same song, different singers

If this sounds like a familiar tactic, that’s because unfortunately, it’s becoming a trend.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, he implemented huge price hikes in the API. That resulted in the shutdown of many third-party apps and tools. Later, Reddit basically carbon-copied Elon’s API hikes and, with short notice, hiked up the price for their services as well.

Both platforms said they had to do it because AI sites were coming along and stealing data, but one convenient side effect was the shutdown of many apps which didn’t carry ads. This forced users to use the platforms’ own apps, which many users — especially in the case of Reddit — consider inferior.

Angry developers

Some Yelp tools have already shut down because of the sudden and dramatic price hike.

The developer of one Mac app, called Restaurants, said Yelp used to let him use up to 25,000 daily calls for free — a model that’s been in place for a decade. They emailed him Friday with that four-day deadline.

For its part, Yelp says it moved to a paid pricing model in 2019 and has been gradually transitioning developers to a paid plan. It apologized for the way it communicated the change and extended free usage for 90 days.

However, many developers remain upset over the four-day deadline and the company's handling of the communication.

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