Google Reveals Google AdSense Revenue Shares

Posted on May 31, 2010

Google decided recently to reveal the percentage it pays publishers with its AdSense program. The numbers were similar to what many bloggers suspected. 68% for content ads and 51% for search partners.

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 - including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.
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. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

Google says they have no plans to change the percentage. Google plans to add the revenue share data to the Google AdSense interface in the future.

Of course, we can't guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don't have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. 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.

Danny Sullivan says Google is known to pay more to large publishers. Google Operating System compares the AdSense payout percentage to Google's recent financial results. Paid Content says Google has been under pressure from Italian antitrust authorities to release the data.