The growing and ever-evolving corporate consolidation of the online advertising industry is a critical issue that should be addressed. Are there any responsible regulators and policymakers out there? We wonder, since so many are asleep at the digital switch. The intense, libidinal rivalry between Google and Microsoft almost knows no bounds. While an alliance with Google may save Yahoo from Microsoft, leasing out its search business all but ends Yahoo’s role as an independent competitor, as far as we are concerned.
One issue that requires analysis is what happens to newspapers if a Google and Yahoo merge or mingle its search business. Between the two companies, they have the majority of newspapers locked up. Yahoo’s newspaper consortium represents hundreds of dailies. Google also has its own newspaper network. Indeed, Google just ran a full-page ad in the March 31, 2008 issue of Advertising Age touting its “Google Print Ads” network. Google says it now “covers all but two of the top 50 media markets and reaches an aggregate audience of more than 40 million readers a day via more than 750 million newspapers, from major dailies like the New York Times to smaller community and college papers, Hispanic newspapers, alternative weeklies and business journals.”
With our nation’s newspaper industry in tatters–and journalism in dire straits–the role that a competitive online ad system plays to provide much needed revenues to newspapers is an important issue. Anti-trust regulators, and other policy makers, should examine the implications to newspaper diversity of any new deal further reducing the competitiveness of the online ad system. By the way, since newspapers are using these systems for behavioral and other targeting, both privacy and data collection issues should be part of the analysis.