Google AdSense Revenue Share Percentages Revealed

For as long as Google AdSense has been in existence, guessing the revenue breakdown between Google and its ad publishers has been something of a parlor game for those in the web biz: It’s been a common assumption that Google has kept the lion’s share of AdSense revenue.

But today, Google has revealed the revenue share percentages for content ads and search ads, and they’re more generous to Google clients than had been commonly thought: Web publishers get 68% of revenue from content ads and 51% of revenue from search ads.

From the AdSense blog:

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 didn’t reveal the revenue share for some of their other AdSense platforms, like AdSense for mobile apps and AdSense for games, but these two are the biggies.

Why did they suddenly reveal the breakdown? Not entirely clear within the context of the post; one theory has it that they did so to respond to Italian antitrust complaints; another, that they wanted to show that they were competitive with Apple’s iAd, which offers a 60-40 split between developers and themselves.

(h/t Metafilter)