Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance

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 twenty years, 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 in 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).

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.

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 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.

Ari Paparo is a writer, podcaster, and commentator on all things advertising. He has worked in the advertising industry for two decades, including as an executive at DoubleClick and Google, and was part of the acquisition and witness to many of the events in the early portions of this book.

He is now the CEO of Marketecture Media, a network of podcasts, newsletters, and events covering the digital media business that includes publications under the Marketecture brand as well as AdTechGod, the Advertising Forum, and Ad Tech Explained.

He lives in the Union Square area of New York with his wife and two kids.