The Leadership Letter

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

When Your Platform Is Threatened From Both Sides

When you sit in the middle of a market, your biggest danger isn't one competitor — it's being squeezed from every direction at once.

The $6B non-premium display market is undergoing a massive shift towards new buying and selling technologies. For Google, this means there are huge opportunities, but also threats to our existing business. Although we have seen anecdotal signs of this shift accelerating, an estimated 70% of the non-premium market is still being bought and sold through traditional ad networks. Thus the strategy in this rapidly evolving market for us is: 1. Be The Inventory Monetization Partner of Choice: attract the most brand safe inventory in the market through AdX and AdSense, and provide yield management solutions that meet the needs of all publishers. 2. Be The Buying Partner of Choice: Position AdX to receive the lion's share of budgets as marketing dollars shift to trading desks and DSPs, by signing Holding Company deals and implementing best-in-class technical integration with DSPs. Areas of concern exist today in the competitive landscape: 1. Disintermediation by Yield Managers — Yield Managers through a scrappy service and tech offering have side-stepped our platform strategy and are 'owning the remnant tag' for a growing number of premium publishers, putting at risk our current and future control over the inventory supply. 2. Inability to Access Large Portals and Social Sites: Facebook and Twitter are still growing rapidly and are currently non-addressable inventory, increasingly diverting dollars and focus away from Google.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Trial Ex. PTX0056 — DOJ public archive
August 23, 2010
Public domain
View the primary source →