Web Marketing Strategy Update

Yesterday Google finally revealed the share of revenue received by publishers using the Adsense for Content and Adsense for Search products.

In a post on the Adsense Blog, Neal Mohan VP, Product Management writes,

“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 … 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 … The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”

“The revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.”

A closely guarded secret since the launch of Adsense in 2003, it appears an Italian antitrust investigation is largely responsible for the disclosure, or at least in its coming now.

In response to the complaints against it, earlier this month Google proposed changes to its contracts with Italian publishers, which included greater transparency in its sharing of advertising revenue. It looks as though having made the figures available for Italians, Google thought it in its best interests to do the same worldwide.

Google has not released the revenue share for any of the other Adsense products, such as Adsense for Feeds, or Adsense for Mobile. Google says it isn’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products yet because they’re quickly evolving, and its still learning about the costs of supporting them.

It will be interesting to see if this leads to competitors touting larger revenue shares in order to pull in more publishers.