The advertiser base for Adsense is people buying search Ads. Some percentage of the advertisers just left defaults on and don’t know they are buying Adsense Ads (now conveniently called Google Ads.)
I could see how this idea would come from someone inside Google. Product doesn’t make them much money and they can claim they made a major change to their business. Because of YouTube, Google has more display inventory to sell now than they can handle. Ironically, the YouTube display inventory is incredibly poor quality, relative to the better Adsense properties out there.
An actual divestment would have to be Google splitting their search engine off from all of their other businesses. Keeping ad sales bundled with Google Search would be reasonable because there wouldn’t be any internal products to promote.
I would also add, breaking the display advertising marketplace would be extremely problematic for third party publishers, and likely guarantee the lock in to Google News, Facebook News, and Apple News for all news sites. Dumping Adsense is very self serving, and could actually amplify Google’s anti-trust issues.
I could see how this idea would come from someone inside Google. Product doesn’t make them much money and they can claim they made a major change to their business. Because of YouTube, Google has more display inventory to sell now than they can handle. Ironically, the YouTube display inventory is incredibly poor quality, relative to the better Adsense properties out there.
An actual divestment would have to be Google splitting their search engine off from all of their other businesses. Keeping ad sales bundled with Google Search would be reasonable because there wouldn’t be any internal products to promote.