By Jody Godoy
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - News Corp explored switching away from Google's advertising tools in 2017 but estimated that doing so would lose the Wall Street Journal publisher at least $9 million in ad revenue, a former executive testified on Tuesday at Google's antitrust trial in Virginia.
Google frustrated publishers by introducing features that benefited itself more than them, said Stephanie Layser, who worked in advertising technology at News Corp from 2017 to 2022. Despite those concerns, almost no one in the publishing industry used anything else, because Google's publisher ad server is tied to Google's ad exchange, she said.
"I felt like they were holding us hostage," Layser said on the stand.
She testified on the second day of what is expected to be a multi-week trial in which the U.S. Department of Justice will seek to show that Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers, advertiser ad networks and the ad exchanges that connect the two.
