Thanks to @robpegoraro for including me in this @Forbes article about Google’s display ad dominance and lack of action about it in the DOJ antitrust action https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2020/10/23/the-lucrative-google-business-that-the-justice-departments-antitrust-suit-doesnt-touch/#5c43d5653c96

I refer to a lack of innovation in the display ad space. What do I mean by that? Well, Google lets small businesses easily buy search keywords with a credit card and a few clicks. Display? Nothing like that. We’re still limited to manually placing rectangles on web pages.

Smaller local publishers are stuck with a “lite” version of a tool engineered for big publishers. But it’s free, which makes it hard to compete with.

Google could make it easy to buy, target and place ads on local publishers. Google could make ad units more like those on social media sites, with rich media and interactive features. It doesn’t because the status quo is just fine for the company.

There’s only so much I can complain about a free service. And I appreciate what Google is doing with GNI. But I think the publishing world would be much different had Google not sat on its domination of the online ad pipes and twiddled its thumbs for the past two decades.

Well, 13 years but who’s counting