To the people who work with it, it hasn't been quiet at all. I work with Google ads every day and it's fucking disgusting the way they're rigging the system against advertisers.

They constantly recommend changes that ensure you spend more money on bad traffic.

They constantly push their "automation" which is essentially just giving Google money and trusting them to spend it where they think is best.

They make your traffic broader and target less relevant people, to get you to spend money on useless clicks.

They made it harder to opt.out of mobile app advertising because that's the most likely traffic to gain money from accidental clicks.

They stopped us seeing exactly where our money was spent.

They constantly contact people with "advisors" who are actually salespeople from the Philippines tasked with getting you to waste more money by enabling money wasting settings.

It's just been getting worse and worse in the last decade, with worse traffic and costing more.

Hey, in fact, here's a screenshot of an "advisor" contacting me today

This is meant to be an official contact from Google but it reads like a scam. This guy isn't trying to help me, he's trying to get me to spend more and enable money-wasting settings in the account.

Also I manage many accounts and he hasn't even mentioned which one he's emailing about!

Oh also, they always want a call so they can be more convincing and pushy, and so their suggestions aren't in writing. If I ask for an email with all their recommendations they usually leave me alone. (Until the next advisor 3 months later)

When $98B revenue isn’t enough….

...are people actually in here defending advertisers? Wtf?

Fuck 'em. If it's so overly expensive, then stop. Leave us the fuck alone and stop stealing our personal information.

I'm not cheering for Google here, but I'm sure as hell not going to advocate for advertisers.

Can we stop using the word quietly for just one day, please?

We are officially in the "capitalism is on decline and corporations are passing their ~~losses~~ slower growth on to yooouuu" stage.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Bloomberg’s Leah Nylen has the details of Dischler’s testimony, where he describes statements he made under oath in 2020.

Raising ad prices was apparently one way for Google to increase search revenue during dry spells — one of which apparently occurred in the spring of 2019, according to an email chain involving Dischler and fellow Google executive Anil Sabharwal.

The email also describes other options for boosting revenue that include making Search more prominent for Chrome users.

Another trial exhibit indicates that Google made $98 billion from search ads for its owned-and-operated services in 2019 (apparently not including revenue from YouTube, according to Big Tech on Trial newsletter reporter Yosef Weitzman), and Dischler said that the number topped $100 billion in 2020.

Dischler said in court that 10 percent was around the upper limit of price increases and that raising prices by 15 percent would be “a dangerous thing to do” — although, as Nylen notes, Dischler acknowledged that overall revenue might still rise even if the high rates drove some advertisers to competitors like Meta or TikTok.

Dischler is resuming testimony today in the trial, which is expected to stretch into November, with a verdict not anticipated until next year.

The original article contains 410 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 51%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I've been marking these advisor emails as spam in our ticketing software for ages, they set off all my alarm bells and raise all the red flags!