6 ms·

Google's AdSense Revenue Share

78 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

michael_dorfman 16y ago
That's "Revenue Share", not "Review Share".
- gavingmiller 16y ago
  Indeed it is - thanks
hooande 16y ago
What other options are there for small websites? Has anyone heard of anything that could be a credible replacement for adsense?
- mikeyur 16y ago
  Direct sales are the most profitable ad solution. Adsense only works (makes you more than a buck or two) with large libraries of content - popular content with high search numbers and lots of advertisers in that space. ie. Articles about dieting and debt will bring you more per click than technology. The best way to make money on a small site is to go out and contact active advertisers (people advertising on sites like your own) and having a low (no-brainer) price for ads. $10-15/mo. for a small 125x125 px ad will bring you more than an adsense banner (for the majority of sites). Affiliate marketing is also a great alternative. Find other products like your own and include those banners mixed in with other ads.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    How does 10$/mo for a small banner work? Meaning, how often would it have to be displayed? Otherwise I think that approach doesn't lead far, namely, you can only make 10$ per month and advertising space.
    - mikeyur 16y ago
      $10 was an example price, but for most small sites you can't expect to make hundreds (or thousands) a month. I consider 'small' less than 1k uniques per day. How you display the ads largely depends on your site and traffic. If you're only receiving a couple hundred pageviews each day, you'd want to have that ad showing as much as possible (to get a better price from the advertiser). For a lot of these ads, you'd have multiple placements. ie. 4 ad spots for 125x125 pixel banners. On a site with a couple hundred pageviews it's realistic to assume you could get $15 for each of those ads (depending on the topic). You're delusional if you think Adsense or other advertising networks will make you more than $15/mo. You're lucky if you get a $1 CPM (cost per 1k views) with most networks, assuming 6,000 views/month on a small site (~200/day * 30) - you can do the math there. Again, this varies depending on the content. I worked for a small content network and we could charge $500/mo. for a banner spot that received about 20,000 views per month. But we only made $100-200 max with Adsense (across the whole site - roughly 45,000 impressions a month).
      - skinnymuch 16y ago
        Just to chip in here, I know you were saying "I consider 'small' less than 1k uniques per day." to give an example, but this example is also most likely assuming you don't have targeted niche specific traffic. My 1K uniques/day pop culture tech/media site makes as much money as my 100 people/day very focused site on Apple products. Both are still serving Adsense only though that is only because I haven't gotten around to changing the latter site's advertising. Also, $1 CPM with Adsense? If you are mainly a content based site (i.e. blogs) and place say two Adsense ads in prominent locations and maybe one Adsense link ad, you should easily top $5 CPM. I usually stay between $5 to $10 CPM for wordpress based sites. Here is an awful yet wonderful example at how you can whore your site out and make it an Adsense cash cow: WiseGeek.com. Specific content example: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-different-fire-pit-designs.htm http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-different-fire-pit-desi....
- patio11 16y ago
  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.]
  - icey 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
- breck 16y ago
  Across my sites my revenue looks like this: Amazon Associates: 60% Adsense: 25% eBay Partner Network: 10% Other affiliate networks(CJ, LinkShare, miscellaneous): 5%
  - skinnymuch 16y ago
    Not bad. Did you get funding from YC already? I'm just trying to understand what your company does :P
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  A good few people I know have been very happy with affiliate ads, especially with Amazon. Those are mainly people with high-quality content - expertise in a niche field or especially fine writers - who are comfortable endorsing specific products. For example, one person has a rather excellent 'how to' book aimed at indie filmmakers, and owns/demonstrates techniques with video-capable DSLR cameras; readers ready to take the plunge are invited to purchase via his affiliate link, and his original content is so good that it's a pretty fair trade: it might cost the buyer $50 more on a $1500 camera but he has easily saved readers many times that amount. It's not his main source of income but it doesn't hurt.
  - moultano 16y ago
    Do affiliate links actually increase the price of the item? I thought the kickback came out of Amazon's margins.
    - anigbrowl 16y ago
      That's right, as far as I know; it's sales commission as opposed to the warehouse model. I meant $50 more than you might pay by shopping among competitors: Amazon might not have the best price but you've derived value from the person's detailed insight into why it's a good purchase, plus you'll get Amazon recommendations for other purchases from people whose reasons for purchasing are similar to your own, which is also useful. My point was that while the revenue is intermittent rather than a steady trickle, the intermittent rewards are individually decent - which dovetails nicely with occasional but high-quality content updates rather than drip content + SEO.
- robk 16y ago
  For contextual ads, you don't have much more of a choice. The recent decline of Yahoo's YPN was sad in that it was the only real alternative. Chitika and Amazon are fine for product-oriented content but lousy on other kinds of content.
petercooper 16y ago
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_578 http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/05/68_of_85_is_really...
- mootothemax 16y ago
  He's now updated his post after Google contacted him to say: ...there is no 15% serving, or any other, fee for those online publishers
- hexis 16y ago
  It's good to remember that Battelle runs an AdSense competitor. Especially considering that Google disputes this claim of his.
  - skinnymuch 16y ago
    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.
- petercooper 16y ago
  It is interesting that even though my post is still a valid statement, it is getting heavily moderated down merely because a third-party made a boo-boo :-) There is something about that outcome that could dissuade one from posting references to controversial or mutable statements in future.
pardo 16y ago
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.
- moultano 16y ago
  It didn't mention anything about this being an aggregated rate, and says throughout that this is the rate you can expect on your sites.
- robk 16y ago
  Pardo - the 68% is exactly the same for each publisher that has a ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXX publisher ID.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- pardo 16y ago
  The Adsense team have clarified this point themselves in a comment to the original article: "The 68% revenue share for AdSense for content applies to all online publishers, and is not an average revenue share. If you're showing AdSense for content ads on your pages, you're receiving 68% of the amount advertisers pay for those ads. While the revenue share can vary for some major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts, these amounts are not in any way averaged together. Also, there isn’t anything additional taken off the top. You get 68 percent, period." [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html?showComment=1274730725838#c7462326975083727256 http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...] My original skepticism was unfounded.
alain94040 16y ago
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.
- nostromo 16y ago
  "Reflects" is the key word here. Of course they keep a profit as well.
  - alain94040 16y ago
    I disagree. It says it "reflects their costs". The key word is cost. That's clearly bogus if you make huge margins, it can't be qualified as cost. The statement would be fair if most of the money would go to real costs, and they would keep a small profit margin on top. That's not the case at all.
    - Raphael 16y ago
      A reflection is only identical if the mirror is perfectly flat.
- patio11 16y ago
  A core part of Google's PR strategy, brand image, and even self-conception is that they're just a bunch of cuddly academics carrying the lamp of knowledge to the world and not, oh, a multi-national advertising firm with 35% margins.
- robk 16y ago
  You're misreading the tone of the post. Google isn't a charity. Their portion of the revshare includes a portion profit and a portion of the cost of adserving.
  - skinnymuch 16y ago
    The difference is how wildly profitable Adsense is. The sentence does not at all give this intent and I would assume anyone reading this post without a lot of Google-finance-knowledge would not expect their margins to be as high as they are.
thiele 16y ago
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.
againstyou 16y ago
apple iAd pressuring google
hexis 16y ago
I wonder if this disclosure was a condition of the AdMob Department of Justice approval.
thefool 16y ago
Several people asked below what viable alternatives there are for small sites. I know that project wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/ http://www.projectwonderful.com/) is one that has a reasonably large following.
jacquesm 16y ago
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.

78 points by gavingmiller 16y ago

michael_dorfman 16y ago

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

gavingmiller 16y ago
Indeed it is - thanks

hooande 16y ago

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

mikeyur 16y ago
Direct sales are the most profitable ad solution. Adsense only works (makes you more than a buck or two) with large libraries of content - popular content with high search numbers and lots of advertisers in that space. ie. Articles about dieting and debt will bring you more per click than technology. The best way to make money on a small site is to go out and contact active advertisers (people advertising on sites like your own) and having a low (no-brainer) price for ads. $10-15/mo. for a small 125x125 px ad will bring you more than an adsense banner (for the majority of sites). Affiliate marketing is also a great alternative. Find other products like your own and include those banners mixed in with other ads.
- Tichy 16y ago
  How does 10$/mo for a small banner work? Meaning, how often would it have to be displayed? Otherwise I think that approach doesn't lead far, namely, you can only make 10$ per month and advertising space.
  - mikeyur 16y ago
    $10 was an example price, but for most small sites you can't expect to make hundreds (or thousands) a month. I consider 'small' less than 1k uniques per day. How you display the ads largely depends on your site and traffic. If you're only receiving a couple hundred pageviews each day, you'd want to have that ad showing as much as possible (to get a better price from the advertiser). For a lot of these ads, you'd have multiple placements. ie. 4 ad spots for 125x125 pixel banners. On a site with a couple hundred pageviews it's realistic to assume you could get $15 for each of those ads (depending on the topic). You're delusional if you think Adsense or other advertising networks will make you more than $15/mo. You're lucky if you get a $1 CPM (cost per 1k views) with most networks, assuming 6,000 views/month on a small site (~200/day * 30) - you can do the math there. Again, this varies depending on the content. I worked for a small content network and we could charge $500/mo. for a banner spot that received about 20,000 views per month. But we only made $100-200 max with Adsense (across the whole site - roughly 45,000 impressions a month).
    - skinnymuch 16y ago
      Just to chip in here, I know you were saying "I consider 'small' less than 1k uniques per day." to give an example, but this example is also most likely assuming you don't have targeted niche specific traffic. My 1K uniques/day pop culture tech/media site makes as much money as my 100 people/day very focused site on Apple products. Both are still serving Adsense only though that is only because I haven't gotten around to changing the latter site's advertising. Also, $1 CPM with Adsense? If you are mainly a content based site (i.e. blogs) and place say two Adsense ads in prominent locations and maybe one Adsense link ad, you should easily top $5 CPM. I usually stay between $5 to $10 CPM for wordpress based sites. Here is an awful yet wonderful example at how you can whore your site out and make it an Adsense cash cow: WiseGeek.com. Specific content example: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-different-fire-pit-designs.htm http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-the-different-fire-pit-desi....
patio11 16y ago
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.]
- icey 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
breck 16y ago
Across my sites my revenue looks like this: Amazon Associates: 60% Adsense: 25% eBay Partner Network: 10% Other affiliate networks(CJ, LinkShare, miscellaneous): 5%
- skinnymuch 16y ago
  Not bad. Did you get funding from YC already? I'm just trying to understand what your company does :P
anigbrowl 16y ago
A good few people I know have been very happy with affiliate ads, especially with Amazon. Those are mainly people with high-quality content - expertise in a niche field or especially fine writers - who are comfortable endorsing specific products. For example, one person has a rather excellent 'how to' book aimed at indie filmmakers, and owns/demonstrates techniques with video-capable DSLR cameras; readers ready to take the plunge are invited to purchase via his affiliate link, and his original content is so good that it's a pretty fair trade: it might cost the buyer $50 more on a $1500 camera but he has easily saved readers many times that amount. It's not his main source of income but it doesn't hurt.
- moultano 16y ago
  Do affiliate links actually increase the price of the item? I thought the kickback came out of Amazon's margins.
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    That's right, as far as I know; it's sales commission as opposed to the warehouse model. I meant $50 more than you might pay by shopping among competitors: Amazon might not have the best price but you've derived value from the person's detailed insight into why it's a good purchase, plus you'll get Amazon recommendations for other purchases from people whose reasons for purchasing are similar to your own, which is also useful. My point was that while the revenue is intermittent rather than a steady trickle, the intermittent rewards are individually decent - which dovetails nicely with occasional but high-quality content updates rather than drip content + SEO.
robk 16y ago
For contextual ads, you don't have much more of a choice. The recent decline of Yahoo's YPN was sad in that it was the only real alternative. Chitika and Amazon are fine for product-oriented content but lousy on other kinds of content.

petercooper 16y ago

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_578 http://battellemedia.com/archives/2010/05/68_of_85_is_really...

mootothemax 16y ago
He's now updated his post after Google contacted him to say: ...there is no 15% serving, or any other, fee for those online publishers
hexis 16y ago
It's good to remember that Battelle runs an AdSense competitor. Especially considering that Google disputes this claim of his.
- skinnymuch 16y ago
  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.
petercooper 16y ago
It is interesting that even though my post is still a valid statement, it is getting heavily moderated down merely because a third-party made a boo-boo :-) There is something about that outcome that could dissuade one from posting references to controversial or mutable statements in future.

pardo 16y ago

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.

moultano 16y ago
It didn't mention anything about this being an aggregated rate, and says throughout that this is the rate you can expect on your sites.
robk 16y ago
Pardo - the 68% is exactly the same for each publisher that has a ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXX publisher ID.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
pardo 16y ago
The Adsense team have clarified this point themselves in a comment to the original article: "The 68% revenue share for AdSense for content applies to all online publishers, and is not an average revenue share. If you're showing AdSense for content ads on your pages, you're receiving 68% of the amount advertisers pay for those ads. While the revenue share can vary for some major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts, these amounts are not in any way averaged together. Also, there isn’t anything additional taken off the top. You get 68 percent, period." [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html?showComment=1274730725838#c7462326975083727256 http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...] My original skepticism was unfounded.

alain94040 16y ago

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.

nostromo 16y ago
"Reflects" is the key word here. Of course they keep a profit as well.
- alain94040 16y ago
  I disagree. It says it "reflects their costs". The key word is cost. That's clearly bogus if you make huge margins, it can't be qualified as cost. The statement would be fair if most of the money would go to real costs, and they would keep a small profit margin on top. That's not the case at all.
  - Raphael 16y ago
    A reflection is only identical if the mirror is perfectly flat.
patio11 16y ago
A core part of Google's PR strategy, brand image, and even self-conception is that they're just a bunch of cuddly academics carrying the lamp of knowledge to the world and not, oh, a multi-national advertising firm with 35% margins.
robk 16y ago
You're misreading the tone of the post. Google isn't a charity. Their portion of the revshare includes a portion profit and a portion of the cost of adserving.
- skinnymuch 16y ago
  The difference is how wildly profitable Adsense is. The sentence does not at all give this intent and I would assume anyone reading this post without a lot of Google-finance-knowledge would not expect their margins to be as high as they are.

thiele 16y ago

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.

againstyou 16y ago

apple iAd pressuring google

hexis 16y ago

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

thefool 16y ago

Several people asked below what viable alternatives there are for small sites. I know that project wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/ http://www.projectwonderful.com/) is one that has a reasonably large following.

jacquesm 16y ago

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.