Google isn’t all-powerful, but it knows how to turn media into water
Opinion
The real damage from Google’s ad monopoly isn’t the 20% it takes. It’s a market that can no longer tell good inventory from bad and prices them almost the same, writes Omar Oakes.
The local WhatsApp group went into meltdown last Tuesday when the worst thing imaginable happened to a suburban London community.
There was a mains leak. Thames Water turned off our water for – brace yourself – several hours. I survived, though I’ve since stocked up on bottled water. Just in case.
I’m one of 16m customers at the mercy of a company fined more than any water supplier in British history, which owes about £20bn and pours sewage into our rivers. In 2026 I can use a driverless taxi in central London, but I can’t choose who pipes water into my house.
And that is what’s really dangerous about a monopoly. It’s not the take-it-or-leave-it pricing, annoying as that is.
It’s that being good stops being worth anything.
The machine that can’t see you
Last Wednesday, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema had to decide how to punish our industry’s adtech behemoth, after already ruling that Google built an illegal monopoly over the tools publishers use to sell advertising.
The US government asked her to force Google to sell its ad exchange. She said no: Google keeps the machine, and promises to behave better in future – a promise from a company whose entire incentive structure rewards it for doing the opposite.
Her earlier ruling in April 2025 had already found Google’s monopoly let it charge a fee of around 20%, reducing what publishers earned. Google would tell you that’s a bargain, given how brilliantly AdX matches the right ad to the right consumer. Given the volume of sanitary towel advertising in my digital life, I remain sceptical.
But publishers are as stuck as I was last Tuesday. Not because they can’t plug in another exchange, but because Brinkema found Google had kept most of its advertiser demand inside AdX, so leaving it meant leaving the money. So even if you can switch pipes, there’s only one reservoir.
One supplier, one price, set by a black box you can’t inspect. That’s the real beauty of being the market: you decide what the market is allowed to know about itself.
Google’s winning argument was that a break-up would hurt the smaller publishers who rely on its technology and scale. So it keeps the machine because too many of us depend on it.
Like water.
Prices haven’t just fallen – they’ve flattened
Google not being broken up won’t kill anyone tomorrow. Just an entire industry.
We need a thriving commercial media industry because, for all its imperfections, media is a free society’s superpower: we are smarter, more knowledgeable, and culturally richer for it. And advertising is the only commercial mechanism anyone has thought of that keeps media open to everyone, not just those who can afford a subscription.
But like any market, media and advertising only work when prices reflect what people want. Break the link between quality and price and, sooner or later, the market breaks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re “pro” or “anti” Big Tech; this is about industry survival.
It’s easy to assume Google’s dominance simply coincided with creators flooding media with cheap content. But oversupply only explains why the average price fell. It doesn’t explain the absence of any premium for quality.
Take coffee: there has never been more cheap, burnt-tasting powder sitting in cans on supermarket shelves, and yet high streets everywhere now feature artisan joints serving expensive flat whites. Same with wine or hotels; oversupply produces spread, not collapse.
What’s abnormal about the open web isn’t that prices have fallen. It’s that they have flattened.
The ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study in December 2023 laid this bare, tracking $123m of spend across 35.5bn impressions and finding that, unlike rational markets, the online display ad market shows little to no correlation between price and quality.
What happens when a machine can’t tell good from bad? It fills up with bad. That same study found made-for-advertising sites took 15% of ad spend, at CPMs just 25% below everyone else’s, despite being less than half as likely to drive a sale.
Buyers eventually cleaned that up, but look at how: they built curation and private marketplaces around the machine.
Don’t be a hostage
Google charging a 20% “fee” isn’t the real harm.
What truly hurts is that, after two decades, we’ve ended up with a market that is built to cloud the difference between good and bad. This, conveniently, means the only value anyone can see is the value created by whoever owns the pipes.
All the evidence suggests that our industry can’t wait for regulators and judges to catch up. So here are some things that media owners could start doing today:
Read the meter. When an advertiser spends £1 on you, how much reaches you? Most media owners cannot answer. Find the number and say it out loud.
Fit a water butt. Every pound that never touches the machine is a pound that isn’t taxed, isn’t hidden, and can’t be produced in court as proof you’d collapse without it. Direct deals, subscriptions, licensing, events, your own data. Not new advice, but a new reason: don’t be the hostage.
Don’t stand there alone. A £13.6bn group action is running in Britain for publishers harmed by Google’s adtech, with a trial listed for September 2028. If you sold display advertising here between 2014 and 2022, you were included automatically unless you opted out. That’s a negotiating position. And in June, the CMA forced Google to give publishers control over whether their work feeds its AI answers. That’s more leverage, but has anyone tried to charge for it?
Even if we can’t fix the machine, we can build routes past it.
So good they can’t ignore you
Be so good they can’t ignore you is my favourite career advice (from comic legend Steve Martin, of all people). But that wisdom also assumes someone (or something) is watching and knows enough to keep score.
These court cases don’t happen because a few tech bros are going rogue. This is systemic market failure. Monopolies cloud the water until nobody can tell what’s worth paying for.
Ask what really separates your inventory from a made-for-advertising site. Then ask why the market is seriously underpricing it.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.