Yield: The Corrections

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.

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 Zawadski, 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.

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.

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.