The inside story of how Google dominates digital advertising
In this new book from former Google executive Ari Paparo we get the inside story of how the company went from zero to total control over advertising; a role so dominant it ended up in antitrust court.
Order now!Yield tells the story of how digital media got commoditized and dominated by tech, and the squeeze it put on journalism
A deeply researched insider’s account of Google’s epic two-decade campaign to dominate online advertising by any means necessary.
Everyone knows Google as the world’s most iconic search engine. But over the past two decades, it has also bought, built, and bullied its way to control of the online advertising market. It has cornered the market so completely that they are often the buyer, seller, and intermediary on a single transaction.
In this gripping work of narrative journalism, former advertising executive Ari Paparo tells the story of how Google—starting in the mid-2000s with its initial near-monopoly on text ads (the ones you see alongside its search results)—began to look for ways to obtain a similar stranglehold on the display advertising market (the boxes and rectangles on most every website).
“We’ll do to display what Google did to search.” —Google exec
It found its edge, as it always has, in new technology—the acquisition of a leading “ad exchange” that allowed display ads to be bought and sold in milliseconds, with users operating more like Wall Street traders in pursuit of marginal but cumulatively huge profits (“yield”) than Mad Men-style creatives.
By the mid-2010s, the company with the founding motto of “Don’t be evil” was systematically using a suite of secret projects with names like “Bernanke,” “Poirot,” and “Bell” to squeeze, gaslight, and manipulate its partners and the market to its will.
“Is there a deeper issue with us owning a platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.” —Google exec
As Google’s ultimate power play became obvious, a shifting alliance of companies, including tech and communications giants like Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon, and traditional publishers like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, The Daily Mail, and Gannett, moved to stop them but ultimately fell short—leaving the question of whether one company could control the future of media and journalism hanging in the balance. Now, the Department of Justice and the courts are the last line of defense, with calls to break up the company and unravel the advertising empire.
Drawing from dozens of first-hand accounts, thousands of pages of court documents, and the author’s first-hand experience as an employee of many of the companies involved, Yield is a gripping story of technological innovation, hard-nosed politics, and how the business of modern advertising really works.
What they’re saying about Yield
“This really is the backroom tea on how the modern ad tech market was created, which names the names and describes all the dirty tricks (usually buried in some murky piece of ads technology) pulled by Google and others. Worth it for the diagrams explaining how digital advertising really works alone . . . Paparo is probably the only person who was both there while it happened and can describe in painstaking detail the weird alchemy between data and money that continues to pay for the Internet.”
–Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys
“Paparo navigates the myopic and the mystical in this gripping tale of advertising technology innovation. From the first glimmerings of ‘programmatic’ to the final scenes of Google’s antitrust trial, Yield delivers the history, the characters, and the intrigue behind the industry we now call Big Tech.”
–John Battelle, cofounder, Wired, The Industry Standard, and Federated Media; author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
“In a world full of platitudinous business books, it’s rare to find a true exposé—one that sheds light on the dark conspiracies that made the most powerful companies on the planet even more powerful. Yield does exactly that, pulling back the curtain on how Google built its ad empire through secret deals and hidden market manipulations. From the clandestine Jedi Blue pact with Facebook to Project Bernanke, an internal scheme that quietly rigged ad auctions in Google’s favor, this book is a masterclass in revealing the unseen forces that shaped digital advertising—and the economy itself.”
–Nicholas Carlson, former editor in chief, Business Insider
“The untold story of how Google conquered online advertising and changed media forever. Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google insider, delivers a riveting exposé of power, technology, and the battle for control of the digital economy.”
–Alex Kantrowitz, founder, Big Technology, and author of Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
Read for yourself: Excerpt from Chapter 2
Brian O’Kelley can be an intimidating figure. The six foot-three former college basketball player makes no apologies about his competitive streak. Combined with his habit of dressing in torn T-shirts and flip-flops, he gives off the contradictory air of both not giving a shit and being willing to do anything to win. After graduating from Princeton with a computer science degree in distributed systems, Brian moved to New York at just the wrong time, the difficult economic years after the dot-com bust. At the time, if you were a technologist in New York, you were likely to end up in either advertising or finance.
Brian ended up at Poindexter, hired to make its software scale. With the Right Media ad server project not happening (or happening slowly), he saw this as an opportunity. He asked Michael and Matt out for lunch. They picked a place across town to add to the stealth. Brian made a proposal to switch sides. Instead of working as a contractor for Poindexter, he would work for Michael and Right Media directly. A deal was made, and as a result, they would need to find new office space.
For Journalists, Producers & Reviewers
Yield is in the news right now
Ari Paparo is the world’s leading expert on Google’s advertising antitrust issues, a topic that is of paramount importance throughout the next year. He has reported first-hand from the courthouse and has deep perspective on the happenings, possible outcomes, and personalities of the participants.
Google’s display advertising business (the subject of Yield) has been found to be an abusive monopoly in federal court, and remedies will be decided — including a potential spin-out or break-up, in the Fall of 2025. A multi-state trial in Texas will start in August, and a civil trial is scheduled for early 2026 in New York.
Topics of interest for Ari and Yield
The future of Google and the potential forced spin-out.
How the open web and journalism survive in the face of AI.
How the tech giants think about media and journalism, and their likely future collaboration.
How arch-rivals Google and Facebook teamed up for “Jedi Blue” and why that’s so controversial.
