

Google's AdSense Revenue Share - gavingmiller
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

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alain94040
_The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued
investment in AdSense_

Where did Google's honesty go? Google is wildly profitable. This post tries to
convince you that they charge you for their _costs_ only. That's just plain
misleading.

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jedberg
That's cost for future R&D -- they don't pay a dividend. All that money goes
in the bank.

They did say "costs for our continued investment in AdSense". Profit is the
continued investment part.

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skinnymuch
jeddy jed jed (are you cool with being called that?) - it looks like you are
technically right, but Google perfectly worded the sentence to make it sound
like they are not making a huge profit, but instead are simply covering costs.
I also strongly believe this is and was their intent.

~~~
jrockway
Wow, are you saying that a writer working for Google is trying to portray
Google in a positive light? Talk about a conspiracy!!!

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skinnymuch
Thanks for you comment, but I don't see the need for the straw manning you
pulled.

I'd at least be able to understand the apparent contempt in your comment if it
looked like there were a decent amount of comments in this thread that weren't
doing exactly what I did by writing the obvious.

On a side note - cheer up man, life is too short for negativity on a personal
level.

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pardo
I may be missing the point here, but I don't think that this announcement
actually says much about what we as individual publishers can expect as rev
share.

What I understand from the article is that 68% of the _aggregated_ revenue
generated by _all_ the publishers is payed back by Google to the publishers,
probably not evenly.

If the figures given are simple averages (TOTAL_AD_REVENUE /
TOTAL_NUMBER_OF_PUBLISHERS) then it is not an useful figure for individual
publishers. For example, it may mean that a handful of huge publishers are
getting a revenue share of 90% but the vast majority of medium and small
publishers are getting 20%. You would still not know how much is the typical
publisher getting.

Until I see more information about how the 68% and the 51% figures were
calculated and about whether all publishers get the same or similar rates,
then I will still have no idea what the effective rev share for a typical
small publisher (less than 1,000,000 pageviews/month) is.

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robk
Pardo - the 68% is exactly the same for each publisher that has a ca-pub-
XXXXXXXXXXXX publisher ID.

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petercooper
John Battelle claims that the share is really 57.8% due to a 15% fee being
taken out:
[http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/05/68_of_85_is_really...](http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/05/68_of_85_is_really_578)

~~~
hexis
It's good to remember that Battelle runs an AdSense competitor. Especially
considering that Google disputes this claim of his.

~~~
skinnymuch
Thanks. I'm a bit anti-Google in that I don't like any big companies
controlling large portions of markets (Google -> Search). But it's important
to remember to wait for proof of claims and to see people's true intentions
and not taking things for granted. For instance, I immediately muttered
"frickin Google" upon reading Battelle's post without even thinking that he
was a competitor blogging without proof.

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hexis
I wonder if this disclosure was a condition of the AdMob Department of Justice
approval.

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hooande
What other options are there for small websites? Has anyone heard of anything
that could be a credible replacement for adsense?

~~~
patio11
At levels above "webmaster welfare" (as my SEO friends call it), you can do
direct ad sales or affiliate ads.

A smart guy once suggested to me that when trying to sell ads on a semi-
successful site he would "give" one of the six ad slots to an affiliate-using
merchant by using their standard affiliate creative in the slot, and watch
what revenue was from that. That would both give social proof to the site
("Look! It already sold one ad!"), and give him a floor to establish prices on
the remaining inventory. If you can make e.g. $60 a month with on affiliate
ad, then charge everybody else $100 a month for the same slot.

Apparently, in many niches, "Your ad in this space. Click here." works well
enough to sell out inventory for small sites. There are many, many options for
you if you want to make it a self-service thing rather than a "Email me,
hammer out an agreement, and after you Paypal me the money I'll add your link
directly in myself."

[Edit: At higher levels of deviousness it occurs to me that why have one
filled slot and five empty ones when you can have five filled slots and one
empty ones. This space is going, going, gone -- get it before it becomes
booked!

Don't like affiliate ads? Advertise your favorite OSS project. You can always
rejigger things once your "last" spot sells, dropping one of the donated "ads"
from the rotation and freeing up another "last" spot.]

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icey
What you're calling devious is what most of us would call effective use of
marketing psychology. Cialdini has written a bunch about it, and I think it's
gotten into the collective marketing consciousness as the "scarcity
principal". It's used everywhere else ("Act now! Supplies are limited!"), why
not on the web?

~~~
skinnymuch
I'm going to assume the OP is calling all marketing psychology devious. Would
you not agree? I know devious has a harsh connotation to it, but strictly
looking at its definition, it seems to fit with your last two sentences.

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thiele
I'm actually surprised that the rev share is so high. Most of the ad networks
that I have used/looked into are around a 50/50 split.

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jacquesm
I think this is a very interesting bit:

"Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense
for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface."

I'm looking forward to that. What bugs me is that I can't seem to buy clicks
for even twice of what google pays for clicks.

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thefool
Several people asked below what viable alternatives there are for small sites.

I know that project wonderful (<http://www.projectwonderful.com/>) is one that
has a reasonably large following.

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michael_dorfman
That's "Revenue Share", not "Review Share".

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gavingmiller
Indeed it is - thanks

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againstyou
apple iAd pressuring google

