AdSense Revenue Share Now Revealed

May 24, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

Adsense for content:

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means Google pays 68% of the revenue that they collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that they keep reflects Google’s costs for their 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 they incur in building products and features that enable their AdWords advertisers to serve ads on their AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

Adsense for Search:

They pay their 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 they keep reflects their costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing their core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when they increased it.

Other Adsense Unit:

They also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. They aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and they’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since their costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom they negotiate individual contracts.

This additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google.

Additionally, when considering different monetization options, they encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.

I would like to know your thoughts on 68% revenue share from Google adsense. What you think 68% share is good or it should be more?