‘Google gave its own advertising system priority when bidding on ad impressions’

Google has been running a secret project for years that gave its own advertising system priority in auctions for online ads. Google kept silent about the existence of this project and made hundreds of millions of dollars annually from it, writes The Wall Street Journal.

The secret Project Bernanke was discovered by press service MLex in an uncensored document Google filed as part of its Texas antitrust lawsuit. The document has since been resubmitted sealed, so that it is no longer possible to read about the project.

With Project Bernanke, Google created an undue advantage in the real-time online advertising market for its own customers. Advertising impressions are traded at online auctions. Different advertisers compete against each other. The whole process takes barely a second, after which a user sees the purchased advertisement. These auctions use various advertising tools from Google, but also from external parties. Google manages almost the entire advertising process, on the buy and sell side.

The Wall Street Journal reports how Google provided Project Bernanke with access to historical data about bids made through Google Ads to alter their own customers’ bids and increase their chances of winning ad auctions. That put rival advertising tools at a disadvantage.

The document mentioning the project was filed as part of a lawsuit against Google by the US state of Texas. The state alleges that Google is engaged in insider trading in the digital advertising market because it had exclusive information about what other ad buyers were willing to pay, which allowed it to ensure that customers using Google’s advertising tools had a greater chance of winning the auction. to win. According to the state, Project Bernanke plays an important role in this.

In a response, Google acknowledges that Project Bernanke exists, but that other advertising parties used similar tools. According to Google, it did nothing wrong by using exclusive data from users to win bids. Google also refers to an earlier analysis by the British market watchdog that stated that Google does not seem to have an advantage in the ad auction market.