The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Control Who Builds On Your Platform Before You Open The Doors

Once you open a platform to everyone, you lose the right to choose who gets to compete with you on it — so pick your moment carefully.

We should discuss this offline. I'm not comfortable opening up the XFP APIs to the YMs at this point.

— Neal Mohan

Jonathan Bellack had written: We are not including the Yield Managers in the trusted tester program, but once we take the API public in Q3/Q4 when the GAM pubs upgrade, we won't be able to pick and choose who gets access. We will have a terms of service and can look at what non-compete constraints we might want, but I think we should be as inclusive as possible to drive platform stickiness. Plus there are not any APIs into the ad selection process due to latency concerns, so the yield managers won't be able to do dynamic allocation. They try a workaround like updating the CPM of network line items dynamically but our initial API quotas will likely put a limit on how up-to-date they could keep things. I also expect that over time we'll institute API charges for 3rd-parties like what AdWords does, so this is actually a good revenue opportunity too.

Neal Mohan had earlier noted: Of all the 3rd party developer categories, yield managers are the ones I am most nervous about in terms of access to our new XFP API. It's fine if they participate via the AdX seller APIs.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Trial Ex. PTX0046 — DOJ public archive
June 25, 2009
Public domain
View the primary source →