"If the story of journalism's 21st-century decline were purely a tale of technological disruption-of print dinosaurs failing to adapt to the internet-that would be painful enough for those of us who believe in the importance of a robust free press. The truth hurts even more. Big Tech platforms didn't just out-compete media organizations for the bulk of the advertising-revenue pie. They also cheated them out of much of what was left over, and got away with it."
"Kate Lindsay: Something went terribly wrong with online ads I will now attempt to explain the concept of an ad-tech monopoly with as little legal or technical jargon as possible. We're talking about the ads that load when you open an article page, like the one you're reading right now. The process of delivering those ads turns out to be extraordinarily complex. In general, whichever ad you see had to win an automated auction to reach your eyeballs."
Journalism's decline involved more than print's failure to adapt; Big Tech platforms captured most advertising revenue and deprived publishers of remaining ad income. The Atlantic filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Google of illegally stripping advertising revenue over a decade, joining other publishers and outlets pursuing similar cases. A federal judge previously found that Google illegally established a monopoly in ad tech. Ad delivery relies on highly complex, automated auctions: advertisers bid using data to value individual readers, publishers list ad space via publisher-side platforms, and ad exchanges run sub-second auctions to determine which ad appears to a reader.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]