I wonder what Google's take on this is. The system is so incomprehensibly complicated they can hide behind that. The FB relationship to me seems like it would be harder to explain away.
Maybe Google could say they are including quality & spam in their winning bid selection instead of only highest price.
Also conversion optimized bidding messes things up/more complicated the highest CPM might not be the best or most profitable ad for them to clear (another problem when they own all sides of the transaction).
FB for instance say they take ad quality, engagement, & predicted user behaviors into account when choosing winning ads not just price - which is also transparent..
Another thing is publishers can usually set floors and optimize for specific bid sources, like newssite.com could let their IOs win bids until it's filled even at a lower CPM.
Or also clear rates, like maybe an SSP bids $100 but it doesn't go through/get paid?
Every advertiser auction selects the winning bid on a combination of the bid price per click as well as the quality of the ad because per-click payment means they want to optimize for the highest expected revenue - if nobody clicks on your shitty ad, Google makes less.
Then there's the added little bit around optimizing for secondary objectives like user engagement so that you don't kill the golden goose by running shocking/negative but highly clicked ads.
I actually don't think the system is "incomprehensibly complicated," but it is opaque.
Yup that's my take. I think this is pretty one sided, but good look explaining what we're talking about to a jury or even some DA somewhere.
I have never worked at google or done anything close to the scale or complexity of building galactic sized RTB networks, but from their papers and the couple people I've talked to they put insanely impressive work into the beast. I'm sure there are all kinds of auction dynamics that I can't even imagine just because of their scale.
Maybe Google could say they are including quality & spam in their winning bid selection instead of only highest price.
Also conversion optimized bidding messes things up/more complicated the highest CPM might not be the best or most profitable ad for them to clear (another problem when they own all sides of the transaction).
FB for instance say they take ad quality, engagement, & predicted user behaviors into account when choosing winning ads not just price - which is also transparent..
Another thing is publishers can usually set floors and optimize for specific bid sources, like newssite.com could let their IOs win bids until it's filled even at a lower CPM.
Or also clear rates, like maybe an SSP bids $100 but it doesn't go through/get paid?