This blog should really have this title:
Why I will never really be a Webologist, whatever than means
Today I was looking at the “My Account” page on Adsense and saw that there was a figure written in grey showing the revenue share. I thought, wow, that is interesting. This is what it says:
As you can see, it says 68 % publisher revenue share for Content and 51 % publisher revenue share for search.
I thought that this was exciting breaking news, so I pinged a friend who uses Adsense to check that they could see it too. They could, and were equally surprised (I shall not name who they are as they have appearances in the web community to maintain).
My friend, lets call him BB, suggested I blogged it right away. It was that exciting. Then he sent me a link, Google announced that they were going to start sharing the revenue share as they wanted to become more transparent. The blog was dated 24th May, so we were only a few days behind, and using the excuse of the bank holiday weekend meant that we were really cutting edge on the whole Internet reporting thing.
But then I spotted the year, Google announced it on 24th May 2010:
- The AdSense revenue share, Monday, May 24, 2010 | 7:00:00 AM
On which they say:
“Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.”
along with a load of other stuff that most people have probably read and forgotten several times already. But just to recap and clarify:
“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”
So that’s that then. A few years ago people were forever asking on forums “how much do I get from the Adsense adverts?”. In fact, another friend asked me this over dinner late last year and I replied, in my wisest voice: “nobody knows, Google does not wish to disclose that information”, which prompted the reply “why the hell do people do business with them then?”.
Well, now we all know. Or, now I now know and everybody else knew just over 1 year ago.
Webologist? My arse.
