Google reveals AdSense revenue share: do you care?

Tue 25 May 2010 18:39, J-P De Clerck

When Google publishes its quarterly results, it always mentions the part of the turnover going to partners, mainly publishers making use of Google’s AdSense platform.

But the company always remained rather vague about the way in which it shares its advertising incomes with publishers. Since yesterday, something has changed in that respect.

Google revealed on its AdSense blog that it pays 68% of the revenue generated by content ads (AdSense for content) to its partners. With search ads (AdSense for search), this is 51% of the revenues.

The question is whether Google actually wants to become more transparent than before, or whether it has little choice as the pressure from publishers and especially from regulators is rising.

In the Wall Street Journal, a person “close to the company” stated that Google has been discussing the possibility of unveiling its revenue split for a while, and that the recent antitrust investigation set up by some Italian news papers seemed like the right moment to do it.

Of course, Italy is not the only country in which Google is being confronted with probes concerning its quasi-monopolistic position in the world of search engines (and far beyond).

Google’s blog post also says that the revenue sharing split of AdSense has not been changed since the start of the platform in 2003, and that the revenue sharing of the search ads has been unchanged since 2005.

Google provided the general percentages, but obviously the company also has quite a few agreements with big publishers that were negotiated under other conditions.

These are of course not mentioned in the post. Is this big news? Probably for some bit I guess for most bloggers, publishers and SEM people not.

There are some smaller announcements in Google’s post and it’s a step in being more transparent. I bet there are other things you would like Google to reveal. I do, anyway.

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