How Google built an ad tech giant — and ended up in court: Ari Paparo’s Yield
A year after Google faced two of the biggest antitrust cases of the 21st century, a new book documents the company’s rise to dominance in digital advertising.
Ari Paparo’s Yield: How Google Bought, Built, and Bullied Its Way to Advertising Dominance (out Aug. 5 from Amplify Publishing) chronicles how Google’s grip on ad tech led it into legal jeopardy. A remedies trial to determine how to curb Google’s control over the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets is scheduled to begin on Sept. 22, 2025.
Paparo brings an insider’s view — he was a VP at DoubleClick when Google acquired it in 2008 — as well as a reporter’s eye, having covered the entire Google ad tech trial in person for his company, Marketecture Media.
The Current spoke with Paparo ahead of the book’s release.
What were the most interesting parts of the book to you?
The current situation — where Google has all this power and this dominant share — is something people just assume has been around forever or was inevitable. But what I discovered in my research was that after Google acquired DoubleClick, there was a pretty big period of time where their position was shaky.
There were quite a few competitors, and a lot of movement in the market. Programmatic really was just coming into its own, real-time bidding was invented and it wasn’t clear how it was going to shake out.
Google just had a lot of baggage, and under the leadership of Neal Mohan and a bunch of his VPs — including me, that’s my little entry into the story — they had to really turn the ship around.
And you think of Google as solely dominant, but they were only dominant in search, they really just had nothing going on in display.
The second thing is the self-inflicted wounds of Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are just really sad in a sense.
They used to be called the Big Three and they accounted for the majority of display ads at some point. And all three, for totally different reasons, went into this permanent spiral of decline. They couldn’t innovate and they couldn’t get their ad systems to work together to be a viable threat against Google.
The last thing was the ad tech ecosystem overall. Companies like PubMatic, Rubicon, AdMeld and others — who all were trying to compete against Google and, in some cases, had significantly better tech or better mousetraps — were effectively shut out because Google owned the ad server. Google could bundle deals that enabled their market share to grow [at the expense of] independents.
You mentioned you worked at DoubleClick when they got acquired by Google. How did you want to fit that into the book without making it full of your own personal perspective?
The whole story starts with the invention of the ad exchange, which was not done at DoubleClick, it was really at Right Media. And DoubleClick’s adoption of it directly turned into Google’s competitive advantage and helped create this massive force that changed advertising forever.
More than that, there’s a story here about how Google lost touch with its customers.
DoubleClick gets acquired and the New York-based DoubleClick team is effectively in charge of the display business at Google. And people like Neal Mohan and Jonathan Bellack and Scott Spencer, they really still had in their DNA that publishing was important, that journalism was important and that advertisers deserved control over where their ads appeared — these [are] core tenets for a lot of the industry.
And over time, what happened was it basically got “Googlefied,” and you ended up with more and more search-oriented, numbers-first product managers taking over. And they started making decisions that weren’t in the best interests of customers — and often not even in the best interests of Google and its profitability.
And slowly but surely, that dawned on customers. And that’s where a lot of the legal problems started because they knew they were being taken advantage of.
The company they were paying millions of dollars to for software was no longer treating them like customers, they were treating them like, effectively, a commodity to be exploited.
Programmatic advertising was so small when Google acquired DoubleClick and the monetization of the internet was just beginning. And within less than 10 years, this power vacuum is created, and now Google is one of the five biggest companies in the world.
The financial market is a pretty good metaphor here because they had been regulated for 100 years. And then in the 1990s and 2000s, quants [quantitative analysts] came about, and you had equity strategies at hedge funds and millions of trades a second, but it was still regulated.
So there was an underlying source of truth, even though the nature of the technology changed. And in advertising, the same kind of transformation happened with programmatic, where it went from two people talking on the phone to do a deal, or maybe a fax or whatever, to millions of bids every second.
And that’s what allowed Google to do things which it thought were OK, until [transparency kicked in] and people found out about them, they said, “Wait, we didn’t know you’re doing that. We’re not willing to accept those business rules.”
And that’s where you also get the Jonathan Bellack quote. In a memo at Google, he wrote, “Is there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.”
I’m sure he regrets sending that email because that quote has been plastered on every lawyer’s desk and every presentation. It’s a great quote.
For people that followed the Google trials, what are they going to find out from your book that they wouldn’t know otherwise?
I think mostly it’s about perspective. It’s very easy to see the world we’re in right now and have no idea what the various parties thought or intended going into it. Understanding the steps it took over 15 years to get to here really helps you better navigate the current landscape.
But also helps predict what might happen in the future and how the different parties think about these problems.