![]() It is also an advertising agency, buying millions of those selfsame ad-spots on behalf of its business customers. What’s more, Google is also a major publisher, offering millions of ad-slots for sale on YouTube and elsewhere. Once the sale is consummated, Google earns three different fees: one for serving as the seller’s agent, another for serving as the buyer’s agent, and a third for the use of its marketplace. That means that there are millions of transactions every single day in which Google (representing a publisher) tells Google (representing the marketplace) about an ad-slot for sale whereupon Google (representing many different advertisers) places bids on that ad-slot. There are many companies that offer one or two of these services, but the two biggest ad-tech companies - Meta and Google - offer all three. A marketplace : The marketplace solicits bids on behalf of the SSP, collects bids from DSPs, and then consummates the transaction by delivering the winning bidder’s ad to the SSP to be crammed into the user’s eyeballs.A “ demand-side platform ” (DSP): The DSP represents the advertisers, consulting a wishlist of specific behavioral traits that each advertiser wants to target.A “ supply-side platform ” (SSP): The SSP acts as the publisher’s broker, bringing each user to market and selling their attention on the basis of their “behavioral” traits. ![]() Such an arrangement has numerous moving parts. And that user will like it! They will be grateful for the process and all the “highly relevant” advertisements it dangled under their nose. These auctions would offer up the user, not the content, to an array of bidders representing different advertisers: “What am I bid for the right to show an ad to a depressed, 19 year old male Kansas City Art Institute sophomore who has recently searched for car loans and also shopped for incontinence pads?” In an eyeblink, every ad-slot on the page would be filled with ads purchased at a premium by advertisers anxious to reach that specific user. Rather than paying commissioned salespeople to convince firms to place ads based on a publication’s reputation and readership, media companies would run ads placed by the winners of a slew of split-second auctions, each time a user moved from one page to another. Once, tech platforms promised that “behavioral advertising” would be a bonanza for both media companies and their tech partners. ![]() News websites are plastered with ads, but more than half of the money those ads generate is siphoned off by ad-tech companies, with the lion’s share going to just two companies, Google and Meta, whose ad-tech duopoly has allowed them to claim an ever-greater share of the income generated by ads placed alongside of news content. It’s not just the mass closures of newsrooms - it’s also the physical and ideological attacks on journalists. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here. This is part two of an ongoing, five-part series.
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