Google’s mission statement seems made to evoke warm and fuzzy feelings about how its products help everyone. “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google says on its corporate site. The company used to have an even more saccharine motto: “Don’t be evil.
But Google moved quickly to reestablish AdX’s power. It created a competitor to header bidding called “Open Bidding,” which let Google take an extra cut of revenue. And under the adoption of header bidding, Google’s AdX ultimately got a “last look” advantage when publishers chose to feed the winning header bid into their publisher ad server — which most often was Google’s DFP.