The switch to unified pricing rules and a unified first price auction

According to Google, the switch to unified pricing rules and a unified first price auction will help our partners simplify how they manage advertising revenue and increase transparency for everyone in the ecosystem. We understand these changes will impact how publishers operate their advertising businesses, so over the next few months our teams will be working with our partners to help them with this transition. We are excited to take this next step together.
Google is making a change to its programmatic exchange that will likely result in marketers paying more for their ads, at least in the short term until brands adjust.

Under a plan announced Wednesday, Google Ad Manager, previously known as Adx, will move to a first-price auction, a significant shift that will resonate across the $48 billion programmatic landscape.

"By simplifying our auction in Ad Manager, we can help make it easier for publishers and app developers to manage and get fair value for their inventory," Google stated in a blog post.

Google previously operated on a second-price auction model, which generally speaking, is similar to winning something on eBay. For example, if the highest bidder bid $5 for an ad, and the second highest bidder bid $3 for the same ad, then the highest bidder would pay $3.01 — just a smidge more than the second highest bid. Now, however, what someone bids is what they pay. Because Google is so critical to how digital ads are bought and sold, the implications of the change will be felt across the industry.

“Moving to a first price auction puts Google at parity with other exchanges and SSPs in the market, and will contribute to a much fairer transactional process across demand sources. The move also provides significantly greater information transparency to both advertisers looking to understand their working media dollars, and publishers looking to assess the fair market value of their supply.” 
- Scott Mulqueen, VP Programmatic and Data Product Operations, Trusted Media Brands

Manage your Google Hotel Ads within Google Ad platform

Google started showing hotel information in a more useful way with sponsored hotel prices in Google Maps in 2010. We all have used this feature coupled to Google Maps, from simple trips to major vacations. Now the initiative has expanded to provide Google Hotel ads to more than 150 countries on Google.com and Google Maps. These features are helping travelers finding hotels on mobile devices and grab hotel deals. I my self is a happy user of the service.
Hotel ads leads to partners grew 65% year over year. With the growth, Google received feedback from ad partners the difficulty in managing  their Hotel ads in a separate platform from their other Google Ads.
Well the feedback have provided positive results, Google Hotel ads will become a part of the Google Ads platform with a new campaign type. Hotel campaigns in Google Ads will launch later this year.

Hotel Ads will launch as an open beta available to advertisers later this year. If you’d like to stay up to date on the Google Ads integration and Hotel Center launch, beta test Hotel ads in Google Ads or learn more about Hotel ads in general, please fill out this interest form.  VIA Google Ads

Google Anti Piracy Movement Within Search, Advertising Space And Beyond.

AKA "How Google Fights Piracy"

Google released today an update to the "How Google Fights Piracy" and we get to see how it fights pirates, educate and redirect general population, manage proper and illegitimate DCMA take down notices. Also high lighted are how the blogger platform is constantly watched for pirate activities. The search engine also direct users towards legitimate sources via ads. The originals search term for the example on the above document used "Star Trek Into Darkness" but even just searching for "watch Star Trek" produced similar but interesting results. So according to Google, search queries containing "watch", "free" and "download" (Which constitute to very small number compared to the general search queries), are presented with similar results.



Google also taking into account DCMA take down notices (again legitimate requests) received by sites in connection with page ranking. Google has now modified the signal in ways that will punish the ranking of some of known sites. The new update will be rolled out worldwide starting next week.

Following is extracted from the updated "How Google Fights Piracy" document;

GOOGLE’S ANTI-PIRACY PRINCIPLES

Create More and Better Legitimate Alternatives. The best way to battle piracy is with better, more convenient, legitimate alternatives to piracy. By developing licensed products with beautiful user experiences, we help drive revenue for creative industries.

Follow the Money. Rogue sites that specialize in online piracy are commercial ventures, which means the most effective way to combat them is to cut off their money supply. Google is a leader in rooting out and ejecting rogue sites from our advertising and payment services, and are raising standards across the industry.

Be Efficient, Effective, and Scalable. Google strives to implement anti-piracy solutions that work. For example, beginning in 2010, Google has made substantial investments in streamlining the copyright removal process for search results. As a result these improved procedures allow us to process copyright removal requests for search results at the rate of four million requests per week with an average turnaround time of less than six hours.

Guard Against Abuse. Unfortunately, fabricated copyright infringement allegations can be used as a pretext for censorship and to hinder competition. Google is committed to ensuring that, even as we battle piracy online, we detect and reject bogus infringement allegations, such as removals for political or competitive reasons.

Provide Transparency. We disclose the number of requests we receive from copyright owners and governments to remove information from our services. We hope these steps toward greater transparency will inform ongoing discussions about content regulation online.