The online advertising space is famously crowded, with thousands of companies working together and in competition with one another to power digital advertising across the web.
We compete with household names like Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, TikTok and Verizon, as well as lesser known but publicly traded leaders like The Trade Desk, Index Exchange, Magnite, MediaMath, OpenX and countless others. Even media companies like Comcast and Disney, and retailers like Walmart and Target, offer advertising technologies that compete with Google.
And competition is growing. In 2021, Microsoft acquired Xandr: an advertising platform that, like Google and many of its competitors, has a full ad tech stack that serves advertisers and publishers. This acquisition enabled Microsoft to sign a landmark deal to build Netflix’s advertising business. The government did not challenge this acquisition.
Our tools have helped website owners, app developers and video providers make more money from ads. Every year, we pay out billions of dollars to the publishing partners in our ad network.
- Thousands of news publishers around the world use Google Ad Manager to run digital advertising on their websites, apps and videos. In a study looking at top news publishers using Google Ad Manager, we found they keep over 95% of the money from displaying digital ads on their content, on average.
- Many marketers and publishers choose to use our advertising tools to buy and sell display ads online. Even when they use the full range of our tools, most of the money goes from advertisers to publishers. At most, we keep about 30% of the revenue, and that’s in cases when only Google’s tools are used.
- This means we share a higher percentage of display ad revenue with publishers than the industry average. In other words, we charge less for our services than many of our competitors. Competition regulators themselves like the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have confirmed these fees are in line with prevailing industry rates.
- A large portion of the revenue Google receives is reinvested into improving the tools and infrastructure that identify the most useful and relevant ads and increase publisher revenue.
Publishers and advertisers typically use multiple competing platforms at the same time to buy and sell ad space. According to industry studies, the average large publisher will use six different platforms to sell ads on its website this year, while advertisers and media agencies will use over three platforms to buy ads, on average.
People increasingly expect — and data privacy laws require — stricter control over ad tracking tools like cookies and ad identifiers. We are focused on meeting these expectations and requirements. We’re also creating privacy-protective solutions that enable others in the industry to operate and compete. For example, we’ve invested heavily in the expansion of Ads Data Hub to provide advertisers and agencies access to Google ads data in a way that preserves user privacy. In addition, we’ve introduced an open-source collaborative initiative called the Privacy Sandbox, working on alternatives to cookies that preserve privacy while enabling advertisers to run effective ads and measure their campaigns, and publishers to show relevant ads that help support quality online content. In 2022, we launched My Ad Center, a new way for people to have more control over the ads they see across Search, Discover and YouTube.