Google's Top Ad Executive goes to a venture capital firm



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The executive at Google's online advertising agency is resigning, which is a rare upheaval at the highest levels of the search giant.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has been overseeing Google ads for five years, is taking a new role in venture capital firm Greylock Partners, the company announced on Monday. In an email, a spokeswoman for Google has confirmed this decision.

Mr. Ramaswamy will be replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, an Internet veteran who recently led Google's suite of productivity applications, including Docs, Drive and Gmail.

Google's digital advertising business is the world leader and remains the company's main business, even though the company, a

Alphabet


GOOGL 0.12%

Inc., continues to grow in other areas. Ads and promotional messages placed next to search results, on YouTube videos and on mobile screens still account for more than 85% of Alphabet's revenue.

However, the growth of advertising is slowing and the company is turning more and more to new businesses, such as cloud computing services and hardware products such as Google Home smart speakers, to increase his income.

Mr. Ramaswamy joined Google in 2003, while the company generated less than $ 1.5 billion in advertising revenue. By acquiring advertising technology and building relationships with marketers and web publishers, he helped Google become a $ 95 billion commercial ad business last year.

Mr. Raghavan will be responsible for revitalizing an ad business facing new threats, such as growing concerns about how Google and others collect user data to target ads. Distribution offers with

Apple

Inc. and others have made it more expensive for Google to serve ads to certain smartphone users.

"I have been working with Prabhakar for many years and I see no one better to lead our monetization efforts," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. "He is the ideal person to succeed Sridhar, whose contributions over the past 15 years have helped Google become the company he is today."

Write to Douglas MacMillan at [email protected]

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