14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s advertising programs have been highly successful for the company and helped it become the giant it is today, a little over a decade after it launched. The biggest share of its ad revenue comes from its search engine, but a significant part also comes from the ads it serves on third-party sites. The AdSense program has been doing great so far, but Google thought it was time for a little transparency concerning how much of the advertisers’ money it keeps for itself. There have been plenty of people asking for this piece of info and finally revealed that the split is 68/32, with the biggest share going to the publishers.
“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,” Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management at Google, wrote.
“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,” he added.
AdSense for content publishers serves contextual ads on third-party sites. Its advertising network is the largest in the world and its ease of use and mostly accurate algorithms, matching the right ads with the right sites, made it popular, especially with smaller publishers. Since launching the network in 2003, the rates have remained the same, 68 percent of the ad revenue goes to the publisher and Google keeps the rest.
AdSense for search serves search ads alongside queries on the customized Google search tools deployed by various sites. For these, the rates are smaller for the publishers as, Google says, it costs more to operate them. In truth, with AdSense for search, the company is providing an additional service, the search engine, besides serving the ads so that weighed on its decision. The rate has been at 51/49 since 2005, when the company increased it. For the immediate future, Google states it’s not likely it will modify any of the rates.