What is AdSense Revenue Share to Publishers?

AdSense for content is a way for website publishers of all sizes to earn money by displaying Google ads on their website’s content pages.If you own or manage a website, blog, or forum, AdSense can help you earn money from your content.

Related Reading: How to Display Google Ads On Websites?

AdSense for search, allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. It offers your users a Google web search directly from your web pages.

By placing an AdSense for search box on your site, you’ll generate earnings from ad clicks made by users on the search results pages.

As stated by Adsense:

For AdSense for search, Adsense publishers receive 51% of the revenue recognized by Google.

This means that Adsense for Search partners will receive a 51% revenue share worldwide, for search ads that receive clicks.This Adsense revenue share percentage for Search has been upped once in 2005 and remained the same since then. 

The remaining 49% percentage goes for expenses involved in AdWords technologies, research, development and enhancing core search.

To be Noted: Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

Other AdSense Products:

For other AdSense products as they’re quickly evolving, the revenue share varies due to different costs of developing and supporting these products. Learning about the costs associated with supporting them is still in progress.

As stated by Adsense:

For Other Adsense Products, we don’t disclose the revenue share.

To be Noted: These percentage of Adsense revenue share for content and search, might vary for major websites with whom Google does negotiate special deals and sign individual contracts.

You can view Adsense revenue share details in your account:

1. Sign in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the gear icon and select Settings from the drop-down list.
3. In the sidebar, under “Account”, click Account information.
4. In the “Account information” section, you’ll see each revenue share displayed next to “Active products.”

                            Publisher Revenue Share

Why Google Leaked, ‘Adsense Revenue Sharing Program’?

The main idea behind Google sharing numbers, is to build transparency and trust amongst its partners. It also helps to gain more insight into the Adsense earnings criteria. But, I feel Adsense is trying to rule out other ad network competition and advocate its partners about trying other monetization options by stating:

“Additionally, 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.

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.”

In other words, while some networks might promise a greater revenue share, they might not always be able to collect on it from advertisers.

In my opinion, these percentages are definitely less for a web Moghul like Google, and they can be slightly hiked at least once in few years.

What’s your opinion about them? Are these percentages in line with what you expected for publisher revenue share? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.