Transcript: How Publishers are Navigating Advertising, AI's Impact on Search Traffic, Biased Incentives of Ad Industry, Future of Publishing | Jared Siegal Founder of Aditude Inc | #104

Haven't seen a even a statistically significant amount of like publisher traffic coming through like link referrals from some AI or chat GPT uh response, right? Um, I would see that like as the actual refer URL. like that. Uh, but the the mix of like direct typing versus search organic is definitely changing. It's it's becoming more and more direct and less search, right? It doesn't mean your traffic is growing and direct is growing in raw volume. It just means direct is becoming a bigger percentage of your overall traffic because like most tech innovation in our industry is for advertisers and not for publishers, right? Which is why we had this entire court case about about Google a few like last month, right? And so we have been trying to stand up for the publisher as like pretty much everyone in our company worked in publishing before coming, you know, to our side of the the market. Guest today is Jared. Uh Jared is the founder and CEO of attitude, a programmatic advertising solution that empowers publishers to scale their revenue. He was previously director of advertising and publisher operations at players, worked at answers.com in revenue and marketing. In this conversation, we'll talk about, you know, programmatic advertising and about the larger ad business. How is online advertising and publisher monetization evolving? And also Jared's experience in building his own startup. I'm Nat Raj, you're listening to the Startup Project podcast. If you haven't subscribed to us already, go ahead and subscribe to us on Spotify or wherever you're listening to this podcast. You can also subscribe to us on substack at startup project.substack.com. Jared, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, I think a good place to start would be how did you get into uh sort of this ad business? Totally by accident. I don't think anyone grows up saying I'm going to serve ads on the internet or even really understands that this part of the economy exists. went to school formetrics, really wanted to work.metric. What ismetric? It's like applying economic theory to math problems and vice versa. What kind of things do you study inmatrix? like really high level mathematics. So it's is it more like statistics? It's a lot of statistics. A lot of statistics. Yeah. It's like problems like how do you control traffic or like large scale cities, are those what the types of problems? Some of it, some supply chain stuff. operations. More so though like how do you yeah, how do you apply it to the operations of a business, kind of stuff. Um so yeah, how I got into that I couldn't even tell you. But um as I was getting ready to graduate from school, I really wanted to work in the car industry. obsessed with cars, wanted to work on cars, wanted to sell cars, wanted to do anything in the car industry. so I reached out to like every graduate from my university that worked at Ford and Chevy and all the major brands here in the US. Couldn't get a job. went to uh the head of our school's entrepreneurship program. and said, hey, I got a cool idea for a class I want to teach here. And I pitched it to him. He's like, this is a great idea, but I really think you should meet this guy from um graduate from our school, he runs a company called answers.com. I said, great, thanks. Let me meet him. I met him. Frankly had no idea what they did, didn't understand it. He offered me a job and I said, sure. And that's kind of how I got into uh online advertising. I had a choice of working on the revenue side of the business or the cost side of the business. I was always taught growing up, always be a revenue driver. So it's like, I'll work on your on the revenue side. That that forced me into ad ops and and very quickly within a few months I fell in love with, you know, this industry. Yeah. So twofold, one was actually trying to grow revenue, one was actually was trying to grow traffic, which obviously indirectly and and directly grows your revenue, right? So on on the revenue side of things, this was right when DFP, now GAM, like was created. So like literally learning how to integrate DFP on a website, figuring out how to get away from this concept of a waterfall auction into something a bit more programmatic and real time. and creating a bunch of different layouts and page types to understand which ad units and sizes and and and arrangements make us the most money. Yeah, DFP, which is now called Gam is Google's ad server. So it's basically used by almost every website on the planet to eventually host like the final auction uh of that ad on your website. Before that like people were literally hard coding ads on their websites and hoping they made money. The creation of the ad server meant that you as a publisher could host an auction, get a bunch of people to to compete for that ad and choose the highest winner. Waterfall is is this idea of like, let me call Google, if Google doesn't fill, let me call partner B. If partner B doesn't feel, let me call partner C. Where we are today and programmatic is, let's get Google, partner A b c D e F G all to compete in real time. They all bid at the same time and whoever wins wins. It's a little bit faster, it's a little bit more efficient and it's far more like accurate in terms of valuing your audience. It's it's gotten more complicated, but this concept of like a real-time auction still exists. So, go back 15 years or almost 15 years now when I was first working on this at answers, the concept of prebid, which is what my my um business operates in like that industry, did not exist. The concept of real-time bidding did not exist, right? And so we had to slowly grow our business and become big enough to be able to go to exchanges like Amazon and so forth and say, hey, we actually want you to build this out for us. We want you to bid in real time. Let's work on that. Um and so I was fortunate enough. We we grew the business at answers. I was one of the first employees there on the revenue side of things and eventually got involved in like traffic acquisition and so forth to grow the audience, but we became so large in 2013 and 2014 in terms of how many people were visiting our website that we had the authority and the position to go to exchange and and demand that they built this stuff out. And what that meant was like I was fortunate enough to be one of the very first people like on the planet that got to work on header bidding. this concept of people, you load their code in the head of the page, they bid in real time and you choose the winner. you know, 15 years later, there's open source code. It's kind of managed by big governance and hundreds and hundreds of companies and exchanges all have their contributions to it and it's optimized and so forth. So it's definitely more like what I'm looking for. Like it's it's much more grown up now. When I was first working on this, it wasn't even like it was a thought, right? And now the industry is very mature. So, uh, I think we need to sort of a little bit explain lay of the land uh to get a sense of what's happening today in the ad industry, right? Who are the different players? For example, I go to, you know, take a name site, I go to, you know, verge.com and I see display ads on the header. Like, who are all the players involved when I'm seeing that ad and like who's the publisher, who's the bill bidder, who is the exchange and what is Google's role versus, you know, what is attitude's role and everything? Okay, cool. So you go to that website. The website Yeah. is the publisher, right? They're the one that are publishing the content and the reason you're on that site is you like the content, you want to read their content. When that ad gets served, 99% of the time that that publisher probably uses Google ad manager as their ad server and it's used by the majority of websites on the planet. That is what eventually makes the final decision of who had the highest bid. For all of these exchanges, Google actually is also an exchange, right? But there's hundreds of exchanges. that work with publishers directly thousands that work on behind the scenes. But all of these exchanges, they need what's called a wrapper to host this auction and pass all of the different bids and creatives, like the ad creatives into Google ad manager. So Google ad manager can make a decision and that's what attitude does, right? And there's a handful of companies that do that part of the business, right? So you have the ad server, you have the advertisers and you have the company that is connecting the advertisers to the publishers. Attitude is that connection. So you basically make the connection between the ad creative and the publisher and send it to the exchange. Well we actually get the creative sort of. We work with the publisher, the publishers are our clients, right? And we basically say, hey, this publisher.com, right? Has or we say verge.com, right? Has uh a square ad on their on their website on the computer that they want to sell. We send a request out to millions of advertisers and say, who has a bid for this user, on this website, for this size right the second. and we collect all of those bids and pass that along into the ad server for the ad server to say, this person won. This ad Nike won. This ad Reebok won. I don't know, I keep going back to shooting. Yeah. acting a sort of like a neutral player and deciding who won. The exchanges really have no choice if they win or not, right? The ad server is who makes that final decision. Now, for us, we are very much a neutral party. We want to to maximize how much revenue that publisher made on that one ad, right? And so I don't care what ad shows within reason. I obviously don't want it to be a bad ad or something like that. but I don't really care if Nike won that ad or if it was an ad for Pizza Hut or whatever. If Pizza Hut wanted to pay more than Nike, cool. It's their it's their ad. So where are you collecting because you are your client is verge.com in this in our example, right? From where are you collect collecting the different bids for this particular ad spot that you have on your publisher? Yeah, it's all happening like in the browser in real time. So you can go to websites if you're really curious about this and go into the console and try type in like ads question mark in the console or in the network and just watch all the bids that are flowing in in real time and and see what the values are and so forth. So publishers basically load our code in the head of their page and on page load, boom. We instantly just start pinging all these different advertisers that they have relationships with, choose the, you know, find the highest bids and send them along. It's happening in milliseconds, which is how ads obviously like you don't sit there waiting for minutes and minutes for ads to show. But for that one ad to be served, you know, to you on that one website, there was probably millions of different agencies and brands and companies that got pinged in a matter of milliseconds to say, hey, do you have something for me? It's a lot more complicated and um I don't know. In practice, all these brands are not they don't have a relationship with Verge, right? They're not calling up someone in Verge, right? They're putting an ad from Google Ads Manager, right? Right. You know, in Facebook or you know. Right, right. They're they're buying, they're placing a bid somewhere else and saying, hey, for the next 24 hours, spend X number of dollars. Yeah. So technically when you're pinging these different um buyers or whoever just want to bid, you're pinging Google's ad server or are you pinging um all of the big exchanges. So sometimes like Facebook meta, right? They have their own ad exchange. We may be paying them. There's a lot of major companies the Rubicon smatics that have publicly traded companies out there. Trade desk is a really popular and large like presence in our space. You're pinging those exchanges. Those exchanges then do the exact same thing kind of that we're doing. They're running auctions but with the advertisers themselves. They're the ones that have those advertiser relationships, right? And so there's kind of like a lot of hops in the chain. there's a lot of different like players involved just to get that one ad server. So um like who because today why why do customers choose attitude versus Google? Because they people I feel like Google is a competitor here, right? Because I could just like extent board in my website and add. Yeah. So you could go directly with like one exchange and they'll probably offer, they'll be able to serve most of your ads. What happens when you only have one exchange is, it's no longer really an auction. They can pay whatever they want to pay for that ad because they don't have to beat out anyone else, right? And so where a company like attitude comes into play is like, don't let in this case Google or Facebook or whoever dictate the value and the price of that ad. Have a bunch of people compete and let the highest one win, right? So in an auction, right? You go to an auction that they're raffling off a car or something like that. You want to have as many bidders as possible. You don't want one person bidding because then they'll just bid a dollar and they won. So, so to explain this and correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm a website, I just don't want my ad space dominant by Google's customers who are putting ads, but I want to create because Google might still like lower the bar and serve lower price to their Right. customers who are Nike and everyone. But now I want to create a fair competition across customers that Google has, Facebook has,matic has, Trade desk has. Is that the correct explanation? Exactly, exactly. And that's why it's better to use attitude to sort of create a neutral. Yeah, you need some piece of technology to do that because one of the things that is important to note is Google ad manager and really most ad servers, not attitude ad server, but most ad servers. Um, don't natively integrate all of the other exchanges. They're kind of like limited to their own exchange, right? And so if you want a bunch of exchanges to compete, you need this third party tech to layer on on your page and like how we separate ourselves from everyone else is our business model and the fact that we are like agnostic. Everyone else that's really in our space and our space like where attitude directly competes in terms of header bidding rappers is not a new industry. It's been around for now, maybe 7, eight, 9, 10 years. where we separate ourselves is we're not taking a percentage cut of the publisher's business. So we don't have ulterior like incentives to let Rubicon win more because they pay us a higher rev share or something like that. It's irrelevant who wins to us. We just want the publisher to make as much money as possible. We get the same price whether Google pays, Rubicon pays, Open X pays, whoever, right? It's it's the same the publisher's paying us the same fee. And so we we've built out a pretty big name for ourselves in the industry. It's being the first SAS pricing model in the space. So how how do you charge the customer? Like because you're not charging a commission based. Yeah. Is it a flat per month or how does it It depends. In most cases, it's a uh a fixed rate per thousand ads. So for every thousand ads your website serves, we make like a penny or two cents or something like that, right? If you're a a smaller company where like you don't even serve enough ads for that to be meaningful to attitude, we work on like what you think of a real traditional SAS model. Hey, give us 500 bucks a month, give us a thousand bucks a month, we'll we'll just run everything for you, right? But uh 99% of the market outside of attitude is the opposite. It's, hey, give us 30% cut of your business and we'll do this for you, right? And so we became a much more affordable model, especially for larger scaled publishers. If I'm a publisher that does millions and millions of dollars a month in ad revenue, giving up 30% is very cost prohibitive. and I'm going to either bring it in house or I'm not going to even do it because it's too much money. Attitude said, oh no no no, wait, we're here, right? Instead of costing you hundreds of thousands or a million dollars a month, come in, you'll give us a few thousand bucks a month and you get all the same services. And who are these publishers of any say I think you need a certain scale where it's better for them to use attitude versus um other if I'm a small website, you know, like my podcast website, I'm not Yeah. going to attitude or there's right. So what kind of scale does a publisher has and who are these publishers like typically? Sure. So the who is we're kind of agnostic to content to some extent. We obviously have like restrictions on NSFW kind of stuff and things like that. but if you're a decent content publication, we want to work with you. Um and that runs the gamut from like sports sites, major sports networks, gaming platforms, to celebrities, to news sites, to blogs that just have a lot of traffic, things like that. and everything in between. The majority of our publishers are in the 300 million plus ads per month. but we do have clients all the way down to like 10 million impressions a month and and up. It really depends on their business model and then if we're cost effective. If you're a really small website, right? and you do a few thousand visits a month, it does not make sense to work with really anyone in our space besides probably Google directly because it's free and then you get whatever you get and you, you know, you kind of move on. But once you start getting to a critical mass in terms of your audience, you're going to want to start to diversify your revenue. You don't want all of your revenue coming from like, you know. So when Google acquired double click, right? Was double click the exchange that basically does what became the Google exchange? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you have a view on like like what's going on right now. No, or Google the whole ling of Google as a monopoly. Okay, let me price this by saying we're a really good partner with Google. Google is a great partner of attitude. There's a reason why companies like mine exist and that is because Google has historically had last look at every auction. If they're the ad server being used, right? They can say, hey, we want this impression or not, right? They see all the other bids that come in and then after they see all that they can say, hey, do I want to bid one penny more and steal that impression, right? And that starts getting into this idea of like, hey, is it really a fair auction? How do we make the entire internet fair, right? And especially for for publishers, right? I guess the advertisers, especially the advertise on the Google platform, a massive leg up against everyone else. And so companies like mine have been coming up with creative ways whether it's through setting price floors and trying to price out Google in certain auctions and things like that or other advertisers or creating our own ad server, right? Like we have our own ad server that competes against GAM to try to make things a bit fairer. With all the recent news about like, hey, monopolization and so forth and like this business needs to be split up. If you're in our space, you're kind of sitting back saying like, yeah, obviously, like this has been going on for 20 years. like everyone knows this, right? What what comes of that? It's going to be years probably until anything like tangible comes from this this decision, right? Like you can't just split up the company that is powering a giant chunk of a trillion dollar industry, right? But even the fix for the whole monopoly argument that is being floated around is to decouple Chrome and not like there's no comp about like the ad. Yeah. right? So it doesn't even seem possible at this point. No, and you bring up an interesting point, right? Like the fact that they they own the browser means that they probably get extra signals inside of Google ad manager to double click their addx like their own demand that like we can't see as third parties, right? Um, but you're right. They're they're missing the the the major point there which is like there's an ad server and an ad exchange and they should really be separated, right? Like that's where the the the real crux of the issue is here. If you're a publisher, that's what you want to happen, not you don't want Chrome being sold off because like Chrome being a really strong and performing app browser because Google owns it and like knows what advertisers wants behooves publishers. It's actually much better for publishers. publishers want that stuff. Um, so yeah, so how are we approaching it, right? Like we've been pitching our ad server for two years. It's a giant piece of our business and we've been doing case studies and like live webinars uh talking about this uh for for quite a while. But it's a major part of our pitch now. It's a big section of our website, the serve platform. And we're definitely going to double down on it because uh, you know, the market is starting to become ripe for disruption and someone to say, hey, like you don't have to do it the same way that you've been doing for the last 20 years. You can do something new, you can try something new and you can take as we like to say, take control back over your inventory. So um you this whole situation to me reminds me of, I don't know if you're familiar with high frequency trading. A little bit, yeah. So there was a book called Flash Boys that Michael Lewis the same author who wrote bunch of finance books that you might be familiar with. and high frequency traders get a direct line of network into Wall Street, like a physical line to the Wall Street servers. Right. So what does that enable them to see is when I a retail investor hit buy on a particular stock, I have a bid sell price, but because they're so close to the network and the latency is much lower, they can always do a buy and sell within the frame of my buy and sell margin. Sure. So that's like, you know, you were just minting money on every transaction. Yeah, yeah. Even even sinister than the paper deal flow that, you know, that came up with Robin Hood where they are selling order flow into particular exchange. I felt like that actually is not the most sinister thing. The most sinister thing I don't know if is the right word, but it's more like easy money if you're just directly able to hook into the servers directly and write a more latencycy code. Um and that's that's that's what happens with fly. So it that situation. Yeah. So our industry does a little bit of that too, right? So the ad exchanges have direct server side connections to the to the ad agencies, right? And these are bidding in 30 to 50 milliseconds, right? And then that auction then to get to me and then eventually the publisher takes like half a second to a second, right? And so they can do a lot of really quick things in the time that we like we're waiting for this ad to serve. And so like we started obviously attitude like started trying to build those direct server connections to exchanges as well to say like, hey, let's let's figure out ways to optimize and reduce costs. If you're not if you have a direct connection it's probably a lot cheaper than if you have to bounce from server to server to server to server and things like that. Now, I don't think anyone's using it in the way that you just described, which is to like buy and sell within that margin in real time. That would be really challenging. You don't know what the sell price is until after the fact. But it is heading that way. So attitude started as a consulting firm, I think you mentioned. So how did that whole transition from like starting as a pure consulting firm to a full fresh product company happen? Yeah. So I started this company, I like to say by accident. I quit my job and I was like, I just want to do something on my own. So I just started consulting for a bunch of publishers that I had become friendly with over the previous 10 years in the space and charging them by the hour. And I never really thought much of it. I went that way for maybe 12 to 14 months, got the business up to close to a million dollar run rate and I was doing well, right? Like that was it. That was my job. I was working a few hours a day and I had maybe 15, 20 clients and so forth. What ended up happening was um helping those clients. fair enough. Back in the day, the auctions on websites were second price auctions. So second price auction basically means one penny higher than the second highest bid, right? So if you have a bid of a dollar and a bid of 80 cents, the dollar bid wins at 81 cents. So I made a career for a year of trying to figure out what kind of actually what you're talking about here, right? That what is that gap? Is it a dollar to 80 cents? And what should I set the minimum price to? Can I set it to 90 cents and still get just as many ads and now I get 91 cents instead of 81 cents, right? And so it was very easy to measure the like the revenue impact of the changes I was making. I would do that day in and day out, just stare at data all day long. publishers get to make more money from of ads. Right. Correct, correct. About 12 months into it, Google said, hey, everything's moving to a first price auction. You can't do this kind of stuff anymore to the whole internet, right? And I was like, God, now what am I going to do with my business? Like I have to completely pivot and find something new, right? because like everything I'm doing right now is is gone. You found a glitch in the system and it got closed. Correct. Yeah, right? And so what ended up happening was like at that time, a lot of my clients were using the same header bidding company and having a lot of issues with that company. and they were paying me essentially an hourly rate to communicate those issues to this third party company and help that company fix their their bugs and their tech issues, right? And I'd done that at that point basically on the side for like 12 months and I was like, okay, why am I doing this? Why am I helping someone else grow their business? Like I've already done that twice at other publishers. I should take over this business. I'm going to build out these this this piece of tech. I'm going do a better job at it. I'm going to sell it to all my existing clients and I'm going to pivot my business. I'm going to go from a, hey, I'm just a pure consultant uh consultant to I'm a tech play and I have a real company, right? Uh I had a few publishers that were willing to test uh early on my my rapper. And I gave it away for free for, I don't know, six, seven months. um just to continue to grow the tech and like learn from it and figure it out. Within those six to seven months, I had officially converted all of my clients over to being basically uh their tech provider. and I was at that point by myself controlling all of their ads. Any ad that was reaching that those websites to serve that, my tech was uh was running that auction, right? And at that point I got an offer to buy the company from a third party. I never thought of myself, right? At that point. I didn't really call it attitude. It was Jared, right? I didn't really think it was a company. and I was kind of blown away that someone would want to acquire me, one person. Who was trying to acquire this? Uh, an ad exchange. Interesting. An ad exchange. Yeah, interesting right? They wanted to get closer to that option. I understand why. But um, I was kind of blown away by it and confused, sat down with my wife who uh, you know, is a an owner in the business as well. and spoke to some friends in the space and like, what should I do? And they were like, don't sell, grow the business. And so uh I call up my best friend. He's now our CTO. and I said, hey, quit your job. He was at a company that had just gone public. I was like, you got to quit your job. I know you have a kid and everything. Come over here, right? Work with me, let's build something. And kind of the rest is a little bit of history, but at that point is when I got really serious. I'm my an engineer, right? So I built our first version of our tech and I had to figure it out in text files. like let's get us set up with official formal code, let's build a real product and let's start to scale this up. Let's start to go to publishers that we don't work with and try to convince them to use us. Within like four months of him starting and us releasing our very first version of what we call the Cloud wrapper, we were doing like three to four billion monthly impressions on the platform. We're up to now, you know, four years later, close to 100 billion ads a month flow through our tech. That's amazing. Today, like how do you find customers? Like do you go actively see similar customers and reach out to them? Like what's your method of? Yeah, to some extent. So for years we relied purely on referrals either from ad exchanges or other publishers that we already work with and like talking to their friends in the space. Oh yeah, we love working with attitude. you should. And and we grew the business pretty successfully that way. Nowadays we do have a big marketing team. We have six or seven sellers, right? And they're going out to the market talking to publishers, talking to ad tech platforms, ad exchanges just to get in their ear like, hey, if you talking to publishers that need help, send them to attitude. And we're out there throwing events and and things like that just to get our name out there. So, you know, we went from a small company that kind of no one really took seriously and honestly most people thought even as we scaled up attitude was still just me a one person company, which was not true. to nowadays like we are the most talked about name in our space. Um and we're probably number two or number three largest in the world at what we do. and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that we're just so out in the market now talking about what we're passionate about. You you've worked in answers.com, which is a pretty well-known website. Yep. You understand ads and where traffic is moving and probably as you know, the state of the business, you have to sort of understand where traffic is going and not. So post chat GPT, are there because I feel like for my own websites that I manage, search slightly changed. Not a lot, but slightly changed. Like is it affecting publishers are they are the publishers really affected at this point by that change or do you see any sort of signals that show that this business is about to change? For sure. Not not necessarily like chat GPT itself specifically, but the fact that Google rolled out AI in its search results radically changed SEO like search engine uh traffic. right? So if you're a website where like the majority of your content is easily answerable in a one sentence or a yes no kind of uh manner, AI is going to kind of frankly crush your business, right? Uh and it probably already has. So publishers that were um like a site like answers.com is long gone at this point. But if answers was around today, it would have been eaten by by AI because everything that has a question with an answer on that site could easily just be answered by AI right in your search results. And never and never take you to the website. Exactly. If you're a site that has opinionated content, gaming, long form content, things that are not necessarily like question answer kind of relationship but more of like thought pieces, you're probably much safer. At least for now from the. It's also interesting because when you say like thought pieces, it takes maybe a decade to build that kind of reputation where your thoughts Truly your thought piece. Right. But when internet shrinks, when traffic shrinks for a new person who could potentially be that voice, how will it actually It's tough. It's tough because you have to have enough content covering enough categories of content to even get ranked by Google and Yahoo search and and Bing feeds and stuff like that, right? Like uh starting a brand new website, if you have like an if you're a real publisher and you want to start talking about basketball. Can't have 10 articles on your site. You're going to have thousands of articles, tons of content, covering tons of different content categories about basketball before like you really get any real traction. Ha be making internet worse and better? Uh, AI inside of search results has made internet worse. I I would say so. I think most publishers would agree with me as well, right? Every piece of tech that has developed in our industry and and this something that we talk about a lot has always been to help the biggest players, right? And never to help publishers. It's always been to help advertisers and it's always been to help search engines and things like that, right? Not at the consequence of the publishing network, right? So AI has a huge impact on traffic for a lot of publishers and we've seen some of our sites that we work with were very much last year September when Google made that major algo update, they were impacted. Other sites that have, like I said, thought pieces and stuff actually won as a result. They their traffic grew. But beyond that, like most tech innovation in our industry is for advertisers and not for publishers, right? Which is why we had this entire court case about about Google a few like last month, right? And so we have been trying to stand up for the publisher as like pretty much everyone in our company worked in publishing before coming, you know, to our side of the the market. But we're trying to build pieces of tech that give publishers more control over what's happening on their website and and at least try as best as we can, it's never possible, but try as best as we can to level the playing field between publisher and advertiser. AI really throws a throws us a curve ball there and everyone. to me this like you're saying it internet is shrinking a little bit. I think every year because the attention is going to the few at the top even within within just you know publishing sites. And even within that the traffic has gone down but how is Google or Facebook still managing to sustain not just sustain but increase ad revenue? Is it? Yeah. Cause they have pricing control? Some extent, but also like a really important piece of information. This is true of any search engine. It's not Google specific. Any search engine probably makes more money from the ads served in their search results than the ads that they than the revenue share that they get on the ads that they help serve on publisher visits, right? So if you go to being and you search for how tall is Michael Jordan? And then you get a bunch of search ads and then websites that link to answers about Michael Jordan. If a user clicks on one of those websites, being probably Microsoft right. They're an advertiser, right? Maybe they make a few pennies off of that ad if it actually serves on that website. But if the person stayed in their search engine and clicked on one of those search results, those paid search results, probably made a dollar, right? So again, like there's like yeah, it's like yeah, there's a huge asymmetry, there's a conflict of interest here, right? Like how are they still making more money because they it behooves them to not send you traffic to your website and to keep it within the search results page. They make more money that way, right? It's the same thing with Facebook, right? They make more money by serving their own ads versus linking out to your website in Facebook. So one way we can reason this is like because AI overviews sort of reduce the overall distribution to different sites, the spot at the top two or top three actually becomes