Google quietly raised ad prices to boost search revenue, says executive

When $98B revenue isn’t enough….

That's late-stage capitalism for you. Making a profit isn't enough. It has to be more profit than last year or your business is floundering.
- Because if you’re not, you’re making less simply due to inflation.
  
  You would need to make $108 Billion in profit this year to have the same relative profit as $98 Billion last year.
$98B in one quarter!

To the people who work with it, it hasn't been quiet at all. I work with Google ads every day and it's fucking disgusting the way they're rigging the system against advertisers.

They constantly recommend changes that ensure you spend more money on bad traffic.

They constantly push their "automation" which is essentially just giving Google money and trusting them to spend it where they think is best.

They make your traffic broader and target less relevant people, to get you to spend money on useless clicks.

They made it harder to opt.out of mobile app advertising because that's the most likely traffic to gain money from accidental clicks.

They stopped us seeing exactly where our money was spent.

They constantly contact people with "advisors" who are actually salespeople from the Philippines tasked with getting you to waste more money by enabling money wasting settings.

It's just been getting worse and worse in the last decade, with worse traffic and costing more.

Hey, in fact, here's a screenshot of an "advisor" contacting me today

This is meant to be an official contact from Google but it reads like a scam. This guy isn't trying to help me, he's trying to get me to spend more and enable money-wasting settings in the account.

Also I manage many accounts and he hasn't even mentioned which one he's emailing about!

Oh also, they always want a call so they can be more convincing and pushy, and so their suggestions aren't in writing. If I ask for an email with all their recommendations they usually leave me alone. (Until the next advisor 3 months later)

Permanently Deleted

...are people actually in here defending advertisers? Wtf?

Fuck 'em. If it's so overly expensive, then stop. Leave us the fuck alone and stop stealing our personal information.

I'm not cheering for Google here, but I'm sure as hell not going to advocate for advertisers.

The cognitive dissonance with advertisers is crazy. They don't see it as perpetuating late stage capitalism and wasteful consumerism. They turn a blind eye to the fact that the reason people are so anxious and depressed is because of the constant badgering that you should want more and more objects in your life instead of just leaving us all the fuck alone.

Fuck advertisers.
- This is an Alien-vs-Predator situation.
- Permanently Deleted
I'm the one with the big comment above, the middleman between Google and the advertisers.

I definitely defend the advertisers. I work with small local businesses who just want to sell their products. I have a guy who just wants to sell quality handles with his daughter. A lady who wants to sell her luxury decorations, and a family who produce extremely secure residential doors.

I'm really happy working with all of them, they're all lovely genuine people with a good product that will absolutely sell to the right person at the right time.

But how do they get to the right person at the right time? How do they fight the giant corporations for your attention so you don't just order from Amazon or TEMU or AliExpress? They advertise.

And what's the best, most cost effective way to advertise right now? Digitally.

Of course they can't compete with the huge marketing budgets of those corporations, but at least they get a small price of the pie, and I help them maximise that effect so they're not showing useless ads to people who never wanted to see their product, and they're not wasting money they could be using to compete with the big guys.

Unfortunately if you block tracking, you're left with the cesspool of untargeted ads that aren't relevant to you, and unfortunately sometimes the ads you see are just related to criteria like "you are over 20 and using a phone" which is useless to everyone and usually the result of companies with more money than sense.

As usual I feel the people to be angry at here are the rich corporations, not every advertiser, of which many are innocent small businesses trying to stay relevant and competitive.
- I’ll take the most irrelevant ads in the world, please. I don’t want to be manipulated.
- I in zero way care. Waste your time and money. You don't deserve access to personal information in any fucking way, and trying to pretend it's for the benefit of "small businesses" or, even more laughably, the people you're forcing your ads in front off, is disgusting. Not that you actually care what anyone else thinks. As long as you get your money, you're happy.

Can we stop using the word quietly for just one day, please?

I can say it softly if you prefer

We are officially in the "capitalism is on decline and corporations are passing their ~~losses~~ slower growth on to yooouuu" stage.

Hell, as a small business owner providing third party IT technical support/repair services, I'd simply like to be able to advertise my actual technical support services in any form whatsoever on Google's bullshit platform.

But for some vague and obscure reason, third party technical support and repair services are banned from advertising under Google Ads - Something that most definitely was not always the case.

At minimum they could provide a realistic and fair certification system for businesses that are obviously legitimate, assuming that providing 'the best experience for the consumer' really is Google's main focus - They seem to be able to provide such a system for questionable online dating services boardering on human trafficking not a problem in the world.

But the shameless unspoken reality is that Google are only interested in maximizing the marketing presence of their own certified partners for the service and repair of Google's own range of products, while burrying the little guy.

You can't even configure the word 'apple' as a keyword search term in your advertising - The customer can't see the keyword, it's just a search term - But you can't use the name of a piece of fruit in your advertising.

Fuck Google.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen has the details of Dischler’s testimony, where he describes statements he made under oath in 2020.

Raising ad prices was apparently one way for Google to increase search revenue during dry spells — one of which apparently occurred in the spring of 2019, according to an email chain involving Dischler and fellow Google executive Anil Sabharwal.

The email also describes other options for boosting revenue that include making Search more prominent for Chrome users.

Another trial exhibit indicates that Google made $98 billion from search ads for its owned-and-operated services in 2019 (apparently not including revenue from YouTube, according to Big Tech on Trial newsletter reporter Yosef Weitzman), and Dischler said that the number topped $100 billion in 2020.

Dischler said in court that 10 percent was around the upper limit of price increases and that raising prices by 15 percent would be “a dangerous thing to do” — although, as Nylen notes, Dischler acknowledged that overall revenue might still rise even if the high rates drove some advertisers to competitors like Meta or TikTok.

Dischler is resuming testimony today in the trial, which is expected to stretch into November, with a verdict not anticipated until next year.

The original article contains 410 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I've been marking these advisor emails as spam in our ticketing software for ages, they set off all my alarm bells and raise all the red flags!