Yes, you're right. It's faster not to have it, but that puts publishers at a disadvantage...Google reaps more revenue and gives less in return if it doesn't exist. Header bidding is often estimated to improve revenue by 10% or so for publishers.

The sequence was first employee probably said something like "make it slower if they aren't on AMP", and the second employee made some kind of suggestion to kill it altogether.

If you need to keep revenue graphs going up and to the right, because that's the primary KPI your unit is judged on, at some point it's technically easier to handicap competition than improve your own offering.

I think this gives us a timestamp on when Google got there.

It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to bad places. The YoY growth of end users is much smaller. Something like 5%. So at some point, the inflated expectations have to mean a dirty playbook.

> It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to bad places

Yeah it seems bizarre that they would try to hold on to that big of growth and not moderate it if this is the method to get it because there's no way it can be sustainably grown for long, but I guess if you're a VP only focused on this quarter's goals and the bonus you'll get out of it, it doesn't really much matter if growth craters a year or two out. You can cash out long before then.

Well, and nobody normally wakes up and says "I'm going to bend the law really hard and create a potential PR disaster, just because."

They do often say "My bonuses are tied to growth, and my management is putting extreme pressure on me to deliver something that's impossible, and I don't see any way of delivering it in the expected time... so I'm going to do it the only way I see."