[shostack]

I might be missing something here. The business model of AdSense is pretty straight forward. Google makes money on AdSense via margin on inventory sold at a CPM rate, or arbitraging those impressions into a higher eCPM by shouldering some risk and selling it on a click basis.

That doesn't even get into the value of the data collected from having publishers tag a significant portion of the internet for you.

Is the accusation that they needed to juice short term revenue numbers by ending publisher relationships that were printing money for them? Because that seems incredibly dumb even for a publicly traded company that is focused on short term profits.

Shooting themselves in the foot several years out I could potentially see happening, but firing the most significant revenue drivers of one of your flagship products seems like it would cause things to crater the very next quarter, not several years out.

I also find it odd that the demand side of Google's products wouldn't raise hell for so many inventory sources being cut off if the cut were in fact that substantial. AdSense directly fuels the GDN and that is something Google has been pushing very hard to grow for years.

Many things here don't add up, but please do correct me if I'm missing something obvious in this. I've only managed tens of millions in spend on the buy side over my career and just made pocket change on AdSense on an ancient crappy side project I launched almost a decade ago, so I'm clearly not as familiar with the inner workings of their sell side as I am the buy side beyond comically horrible experiences with AdSense reps trying to sell me on adding it to the site of a company I worked at.