Estibot.com Blog

This just in from Google: They’ve disclosed the revenue share they pay out to Adsense publishers. Long the topic of much speculation, Adsense publisher revenue share has thus far been Google’s secret, but no more. I find the revenue share surprisingly large. I though it would have been much smaller for publishers. Certainly it is rare to see the sort of CPC in one’s Adsense account as one can spy on Google’s Adwords tool (or estibot’s) max CPC listings. Anyway, here’s a quote from the Inside Adsense email just in:

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

68% is a pretty handsome revenue share. I would really like to see the same figures published by domain parking houses such as SEDO, whose clicks seem to pay dismally. High-CPC keyword clicks on SEDO pay pennies. How much is their cut? I do realize that Google may pay less for domain parking feeds, and instead of two parties sharing the revenue, in the case of domain parking, there are always three.

While Google have their critics, and they are not without fault, Adsense still trumps any other contextual advertising system out there. For its ease of use, reliability, smart technology, and now a fair revenue share to boot.