[mbillie1]

Their product is the advertising platform, so the price-raising should be evaluated there. Their consumer "products" eg newsfeed, mail, messenger, search etc are just mechanisms for demographic gathering for the purposes of advertisement sales, or for direct advertisement delivery.

[ucaetano]

CPAs have been going down since forever. So yep, no monopoly here, plenty of competition.

People who talk about FB or Google "monopoly" don't understand what a monopoly is.

[jacksmith21006]

Fully agree. Heck Bing is one less character and nobody is stopped from using. Chrome takes work to download versus MS browser come preinstalled.

If you do not want Android buy an iPhone. Gmail, YouTube, Google photos and pretty much every other Google thing works fine on the iPhone.

Do not want a Google home buy an Echo. We really should not be penalizing a company for creating a better product and winning in the marketplace, imo.

Google gave away Android source code and Amazon used to create the echo. Google gave away Chrommium and companies use. Google gave away Borg with K8s and TF and all their papers including map reduce and others.

[dlp211]

Since Google's entire ad-platform is based on the 2nd bid price auction and they have no control over the prices that advertisers bid, I don't see how they can be raising prices other than making their delivery platforms more valuable to the end consumer.

[supernovae]

One way they raise prices is artificial shortages and altering supply/demand in a way that favors them.

The only side that is really a "free market" is content advertising because they don't control all the levers of optimization... but it too will bite your ass and favor them in both marketing and publisher suffering.

On google search, they can invoke quality score, sort scoring, auction optimization and create a funnel/flow that advertisers must continually optimize against much to the favor of Google.

They also change their TOS to be beneficial to their algorithm all the time now. Take the recent 200% budget change, they can now spend 200% of your budget and they optimize this 200% spend over long(er) terms. Seems to be removing the human touch and favoring the algorithm.

They also optimize their CPA to be a black box. I recently switched to CPA because they told me to. What you learn the hard way is that their pricing is modeled in their favor and over averages/terms that benefit them. When you say you want a $1.00 CPA you're not protected against paying exponentially more than that... They even trick you by getting you to update google analytics with "smart actions" that only add bull crap as to what a CPA/conversion is - once again in their favor

All of this seems to just scare away the smaller buyers because they can't compete when industry pricing and averaging excludes them from being able to plan/budget and pay for advertising accordingly.

The only people with the pockets to play the game are the encumbered organizations that also do other trades with Google - such as large purchases of Google G! Suite, Large deals with Google cloud or their data/analytics services.

Login to google adwords, it says "hey switch to CPA" then eventually "hey, use smart campaigns" and sooner or later you can't even control the crap your buying because you can't block/filter/target anymore because the borg is doing it for you and oh btw, we spend your entire budget at 12:01 am sending you 1000 visitors a second even though its not an accelerated campaign and we doubled your budget and we told you to reach more visitors to add more to your budget. Oh, did we not tell you that we weren't running your ads until you increased your budget and now that you increased it we're going to spend 200% more?

its crazy...

It wouldn't be so bad if these giants weren't trying to kill natural search and natural engagement so fast but they realize the only way they can grow is to monetize the entire funnel and the only people that can afford to do that are the giants..

I wish i could spend more on bing but it doesn't have the traffic mostly for what appears to be obsession for google. In the USA bing is great.. i've heard it sucks elsewhere, but i wish they could compete more.