The FTC's consumer protection unit opened investigations into both Google and Amazon today over whether they've been lying to advertisers about pricing and effectiveness. About fucking time.
Anyone who's ever burned money on Google Ads or Amazon sponsored products knows exactly what this is about. You set up campaigns based on their projected metrics, spend $50K expecting certain results, and get maybe 20% of what they promised. Marketing forums are full of horror stories about deceptive bid estimates and fake impression counts. Then when you complain, they blame your "targeting" or suggest you weren't bidding high enough.
The FTC is specifically looking at reserve pricing disclosure - whether Amazon told advertisers about minimum bid thresholds that would actually get their ads shown. Spoiler alert: they didn't. I've had clients bid $2 on keywords where the actual minimum was $8, and Amazon just took their money while showing their ads to nobody.
For Google, investigators want to know if they've been increasing ad costs without proper disclosure. Every Google Ads account I've touched has the same pattern: decent results for 2-3 months, then costs mysteriously creep up while performance tanks. Google's response? "Market competition increased." Right.
Here's what really pisses me off about this: both companies are facing separate antitrust trials starting September 22nd. Google's getting sued over their ad tech monopoly, Amazon over Prime enrollment tricks. These investigations just confirm they've been screwing advertisers while building their monopolies.
The investigation comes from Bloomberg's reporting this morning, which means someone inside the FTC got tired of watching small businesses get fleeced. Google and Amazon make a combined $500+ billion annually mostly from advertising, while most advertisers see negative ROI on their first $10K spent.
This isn't going away. The FTC's consumer protection unit doesn't fuck around like their competition division. They focus on direct harm to businesses and consumers, which is exactly what deceptive ad pricing causes.
While Google and Amazon "declined to comment," I bet their legal teams are already working overtime trying to explain why their internal emails about "optimizing revenue extraction" were really about "improving advertiser experience."