News Corp would lose $9 million by giving up Google ads, ex-director tells Reuters

By Jody Godoy

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) – News Corp (NASDAQ: ) explored ditching Google’s (NASDAQ: ) advertising tools in 2017, but estimated it would cost the Wall Street Journal publisher at least $9 million in revenue of ads, a former executive testified Tuesday at Google’s antitrust trial in Virginia.

Google frustrated publishers by introducing features that benefited them more, said Stephanie Layser, who worked in ad tech at News Corp from 2017 to 2022. Despite those concerns, almost no one in the publishing industry used something else, because the ad server of Google publishers. it’s related to Google’s ad exchange, she said.

“It felt like we were being held hostage,” Layser said on the stand.

She testified on the second day of what is expected to be a weeks-long trial in which the US Justice Department will try to show that Google monopolized the markets for publishers’ ad servers, ad networks and exchanges. ads that link the two.

NewsCorp documents presented at trial estimated that in 2016, the publisher earned $83.3 million from ads sold instantly through ad tech tools. More than half of those transactions came through Google’s ad exchange, with $18.4 million from Google advertisers.

The editor estimated that about half of that, or $9 million, was exclusive to Google and would be lost in any switch to another product.

Until he left, about 70-80 percent of News Corp’s ad deals went through Google’s ad exchange, Layser said.

Google said the case was based on an outdated view of the industry and that big publishers use an average of six different platforms to sell ads and that there are more than 80 such services.

In the lawsuit, prosecutors are trying to show that Google used dominant positions in technology for publishers and advertisers to prevent them from using other tools and undercutting bids placed through competitors’ products.

If U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema finds that Google violated the law, she would consider prosecutors’ request to make Google sell at least Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and exchange of his announcements.