Yield: The Corrections

Last updated: August 25, 2025

I interviewed something like 60 people in the writing of Yield and did my best to represent things as accurately as possible. But in some cases there was conflicting information or, more often, conflicting memories of the events. In the interest of transparency I’m going to keep this page updated with all the errors, corrections, and interpretations of events where I believe there are legitimate questions about the facts presented in the book.

Who would have thought the biggest controversy in the book would come from the Glossary!? I defined the term “SSP” as “A largely abandoned term…” and boy do people disagree! Personally, I never use it and prefer “Exchange” but apparently I’m 100% wrong on this one. Scott Ensign from Butler/Till started the conversation on LinkedIn.

Devil’s advocate: If “Exchange” and “SSP” are different things, then please name another exchange besides AdX?

I state that DoubleClick was founded by “the two Kevins,” but technically it was founded by Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman, with Kevin Ryan joining as CFO.

Joe Zawadzki’s name is misspelled as “Zawadski” throughout the book. This is embarrassing. My bad.

While everyone agrees that Right Media had a deal with Poindexter to build out an ad server, there were a lot of different memories of how far along that project was and whether it even started. Joe Zawadzki, the former CEO of Poindexter, indicated that the deal was killed by his board before it started.

Everyone involved in Project Wolf (the precursor to AdX) made themselves the hero of the story. It was 15+ years ago, so let’s give them some slack. In the book, Michael Rubenstein is essentially the ringleader, with Scott Spencer being recruited to do the build out. Scott wasn’t able to speak to me due to his involvement in litigation, but my understanding is that his version of events would largely be the opposite, with him spearheading Wolf until Rubenstein was brought on. There was also a story I heard from multiple people that Scott had decided to leave the company before being “saved” to join Wolf, but Scott says that didn’t happen.

We know that Google was not the only, or even the highest, bidder for DoubleClick. David Rosenblatt told me that both Microsoft and Yahoo were bidding on the company until the very end. However, this story contradicted contemporaneous conversations he had with me and others where he indicated that Terry Semel of Yahoo had dropped out much earlier in the process at a bid somewhere around $1 million.

The story in the book about Google getting spooked by a competitive bid by Microsoft also has some details that are in (minor) dispute. Rosenblatt says that Google’s chief counsel, David Drummond, called off the diligence meetings immediately. Others present remember that it was no Drummond personally, and that the meetings did continue, though truncated from the original schedule.

At the end of the YMAG chapter I write “From April to August, 2017, over $10 Billion…” That should be 2007, not 2017.

In this chapter I tell the story of the creation of Ads.txt, and perhaps leaned a bit too heavily on the narrative from Google’s point of view. Neal Richter chimed in on LinkedIn about my telling of the origins of Ads.txt, saying:

Diane Yu’s name is misspelled with two “n”s.

Another misspelled name! Chris Guenther from News Corp is the correct spelling.

On page 172 of the print edition, a quote from Apple executive Craig Federighi is repeated. This is a copy editing mistake.

The epitaph quote at the head of this chapter (“The problem seems to be…”) is incorrectly attributed in the print edition to Emry Dowinghall of Chegg, when it should be Steph Layser of News Corp. This is fixed in the Kindle and audio versions.

In the aftermath of the disastrous UPR announcement meeting, Steph Layser asked for a meeting with Jonathan Bellack, the head of publisher products for the unit. At the time Bellack had already moved on to another position at Google, though it is possible Layser was not aware of this.

I wrote that Judge Brinkema “ruled against Google on the Adverse Inference motion.” This was not a final ruling, and Arielle Garcia of CheckMyAds corrected me, noting that in the actual final ruling in the case the judge wrote the following:

Keep your corrections coming!