Publishers 'forced' to use Google's advertising products

Publishers are effectively forced to use Google’s advertising products, a senior ­publishing executive told a landmark trial in which the tech giant is accused of ­operating a monopoly.

Matthew Wheatland, Chief ­Digital Officer at dailymail.com, was called by the US Department of Justice as their sole witness to rebut Google’s case at the end of a trial that has lasted 15 days.

Government lawyers accuse Google of trying to monopolise display advertising on websites and depriving the publishing industry, including news ­websites, of hundreds of ­millions of dollars in revenue.

The judge, Leonie Brinkema, could ultimately decide that Google is operating a monopoly and force it to sell off part of its advertising business.

Billions of adverts on web pages are bought and sold each day through ‘programmatic ­display advertising’, a process involving automated auctions that take milliseconds.

Google owns the biggest ad server used by publishers to sell the adverts, known as DFP, and the biggest tool used by ­advertisers to buy them, known as Google Ads.

It also runs the largest exchange where the auctions are run, which is called AdX.

When combined, those tech tools keep 36 cents of every advertising dollar that goes through them, claim the government lawyers.

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In its case, Google has argued that it faces competition from Facebook, TikTok and others, and advertisers are moving their spending away from websites, instead using it for other areas including apps and social media.

Mr Wheatland was asked by prosecutor Julia Wood whether advertisers shifting to social media ‘impacts your negotiations with Google as an ad tech user’.

He said: ‘That doesn’t really. If advertisers change where they run their ad spend, that doesn’t help the publisher per se. You can’t shift those open web impressions to some other medium.’

Mr Wheatland was also asked what he thought about a ­suggestion made in the trial that publishers ‘work harder’ to sell more advertising directly to ­advertisers, rather than relying on programmatic sales.

He said: ‘We work hard to sell direct impressions already. We work to sell as much as we can to direct clients. It’s difficult to sell direct. The cost of doing business with direct sales is high. You need all of the support staff, sales ­people, creative, marketing, you need to generate post-market reports.

‘In general, direct sales is not how the majority of ad sales runs across the open web.’

Mr Wheatland was then asked if he was aware of a trend in which advertisers were spending more on apps, and whether the Daily Mail has an app.

He said the publisher had made a ‘significant investment’ in its app.

Separate apps were needed for different operating systems and support staff were also required, he said. Mr Wheatland added that the tendency was to get higher prices for ads on web than app.

He said: ‘Maybe 2 per cent of our readership comes to us on app,’ and added: ‘It’s not possible to shift all of our readership from web to app.’

Both the DOJ and Google have concluded their evidence and ­closing arguments will be ­delivered in late November.