Courtesy of Ari Paparo/Marketecture
This leaked 2007 DoubleClick pitch deck is set to play a central role in Google’s blockbuster adtech antitrust trial
September 4, 20240
DoubleClick was the largest publisher ad server — technology that helps publishers manage their ad inventory and decide which ads should appear.
Courtesy of Ari Paparo/Marketecture
The DOJ claims in its suit that DoubleClick’s ad server had a roughly 60% market share at the time. It also owned a relatively new ad exchange called AdX that helped connect ad buyers and publishers in online ad auctions.
Here’s a slide from the DOJ’s complaint that maps out Google’s entire adtech business as of last year.
The US Department of Justice
Post-acquisition, the DoubleClick assets later became Google Ad Manager, which the DOJ claims in its complaint has a roughly 90% share of the US publisher ad server market. The Google AdExchange grew to around a 50% market share, the DOJ says.
The Federal Trade Commission approved the Google-DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 after an eight-month investigation. The agency concluded that competition at the time among firms in the market was “vigorous, and will likely increase.”
The entire DoubleClick business was projected to generate $323.6 million in revenue by the end of 2007.
Courtesy of Ari Paparo/Marketecture
DoubleClick worked with advertisers, too. It positioned its offering as DART, which stands for Dynamic Advertising, Reporting, and Targeting.
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The phrase “dynamic allocation” appears 55 times in the DOJ’s complaint.
It refers to an auction mechanism where, the DOJ says, Google could configure its ad server to give its AdX ad exchange the first chance to buy a publisher’s ad inventory before it was offered out to rival ad exchanges — and at lower prices.
DoubleClick outlines that a competitive advantage was that its advertiser clients could ‘cherry-pick’ the best ad inventory.
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“In the end, the winner will be the company with the largest pool of liquidity,” the slide reads. DoubleClick said the winner would achieve this by becoming the go-to ad server, by allowing for an open flow of ad inventory and data, and offering solutions for all types of different inventory.
For Yahoo, which this particular deck was aimed at, the ‘total estimated annual revenue opportunity’ was $2.6 billion after the company had paid relevant traffic acquisition costs.
Courtesy of Ari Paparo/Marketecture
In 2020, Google’s Ad Manager, AdSense for Content, and DV360 adtech businesses generated $15 billion in gross revenue and $2.9 billion in net revenue, according to the published trial exhibits.
Industry analyst Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall, estimated that Google had a nearly 50% share of the US ad server and exchange adtech market and around a third of the demand-side platform, or advertiser, side.