Google reveals AdSense Revenue Share

Seven (7) years — that’s how long Google has been keeping secret how much share it is giving bloggers and publishers in their AdSense network.

Google used to claim that the exact percentage of the revenue share is a closely guarded secret and is an information they don’t want to reveal publicly to keep the competitive edge.

But in a blog post at the official AdSense blog, Google finally spilled the beans:

• On AdSense for Content, Google gives 68% of the revenue to publishers. That means for every $100 spent by an advertiser on AdWords, publishers get $68.
• On AdSense for Search, Google gives 51% of the revenue to publishers. This is for publishers who are using Google Site Search.

Neal Mohan, VP for Product Management for Google, wrote:

We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression.

Google only shared information for these two but there are other smaller services like AdSense for Domains and AdSense for Videos, they did not mention.

Mohan stressed that “when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading”.

Google AdSense can practically fill up unsold inventories. While that might be true in most cases, it doesn’t apply when the entire inventory of a website is actually booked for advertising. Then the revenue share already matters.

By revealing the revenue share with publishers, Google could be putting pressure on other ad networks to actually improve their existing revenue share to match that of Google’s.