By Jeff Green, co-founder and CEO, The Trade Desk
When Google went public in 2004, co-founder Larry Page made a commitment to shareholders and the world. A well-functioning society, he wrote in his founder’s letter, should have abundant, free, and unbiased access to high-quality information.
For 20 years, Google kept that promise by doing one thing well: It connected its visitors to other companies’ content. You asked a question, Google handed you a list of doors, and you walked through them to the millions of sites built by merchants, publishers, universities, and anyone with something to say. Google created the world’s greatest information organization system. The insights, ideas, and content of the millions of open internet destinations were indexed, not taken.
That was the deal. Google got rich by putting little ads next to an index of the open internet, and all the creators, authors, publishers, game makers, journalists, movie makers, and songwriters got an audience.
Google quietly canceled this deal a few years ago. Now, finally, they have stopped pretending. They acknowledge they canceled the deal, and that the world they created is being replaced by a super-walled garden.
The New York Times laid out the new arrangement in late July: Google has rebuilt search around AI that answers inside the box and keeps you there. People write longer questions or prompts and leave sessions less often. Traffic to the sites that feed those answers is falling, and some of the businesses built on that traffic are already being sold for parts or going away.
Google built its business on organizing the world’s information. Now it seems to be co-opting it. As one fellow public C-level framed it to me, “Google is turning its back on the ecosystem it created.”
Google’s answer to this criticism about co-opting is to talk about volume. Billions of clicks, still flowing, the numbers relatively stable. But every figure that says the web is healthy comes from Google.
When the only source insisting nothing changed is the company that changed it, that is the story.
Here is what the recent coverage misses. While Google spent the last few years building a fence, the rest of the industry spent that time building doors.
My company, The Trade Desk, helps the world’s biggest companies decide where to spend their advertising dollars, with about 90% of the Fortune 500 as clients. When I started the company, our time and effort were spent on websites accessed via a browser. Before the user went through a door to land on the website, they used Google or Chrome as a way to get there.
That started to change about 10 years ago, when we began pushing ad dollars to the premium open internet we viewed as out of reach for Google.
The best of the open internet, the most premium, never touches the search engine. The open internet isn’t just a few websites. The open internet was remodeled years ago by premium content because the alternative was waiting — and waiting is how you end up being sold for parts.
Google has had difficulty controlling and taxing the open internet. Companies like The Trade Desk once spent most of their ad dollars on banners and videos on browser-based websites — now that represents only 10% of spend. And that new mix reflects where the open internet is now.
The open internet is led by movies, TV, music, sports, and journalism. The first four are thriving. The written word is struggling in part because publishers’ content has been stolen, demolishing their business models.
Advertising dollars, audience attention, and publisher relationships have already moved beyond the search box and where Google cannot measure. The new open internet is getting built in real time, door by door. Many companies have since joined the open internet, including Disney, Netflix, Spotify, Paramount, Peacock, and Fox — as well as retailers and podcasters.
The attention is shifting. People are watching more television than ever, on their own terms, through streaming. Connected TV is the fastest-growing premium screen in advertising, and no single company owns the way in. Advertisers are reaching the biggest audiences there. Channels that are not owned by Google are growing.
A healthy internet has many front doors, and people should be free to walk through any of them. The open internet was always a bet on many independent players, competing and cooperating in the open, but one company decided what the world gets to see. Google is now publicly betting against that idea. The market is betting against that change with its budgets. That might be the most amazing by-product for publishers.
Where Google once provided doors to the open internet, Gemini AI Mode now builds walls to prevent access to full premium content. It will read every book and every website in the world. It can summarize and answer questions about any of them in seconds. However, few businesses or people seem to be asking: What incentive is left to write books and publish websites?
As Google walls off the internet it once promised to open, the industry has moved on. The advertisers, publishers, and technologists who believe the web belongs to more than one company are continuing to build the alternative that reflects the industry’s true shape in this important moment.
The open internet was never Google’s to lose. The traffic to journalism and traditional websites is way down. It will get worse. However, there is a silver lining.
The largest slice of the advertising pie ever assembled by one company is the search market share, which represents hundreds of billions of annual revenue. This is the money machine that has fueled the world that Google is now abandoning. This means that something many of us thought could never happen is happening. All the dollars that once went to traditional search are up for the taking.
And search advertising spend is up for grabs.
Smarter marketing starts with The Trade Desk.
This sponsored post was supplied by The Trade Desk.
