Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Google.com and the company's foreign search sites contribute more to Google's bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.
So publishers are making 78.5 cents for every dollar an advertiser pays out. And this is in line with the figure I had always believed the revenue split to be.
The full article:
[nytimes.com...]
may be.
For smaller sites or sites who has been struck by
StupidPricingTM it could be not exactly true.
Just my 2 cents in addition to their 78.5
i imagine publishers grossing 5$ per day having different revenue sharing from those grossing 1000$ per day.
my gut feeling
I agree with Aircut.
There does seem to be a wide discrepancy among payouts for different sites.
Any one of them who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. (The discussion's creator then splits his share with others who post messages.)
Is this allowed under Google Adsense TOS?
Why do I have the feeling that advertisers will get a raw deal? And that the conversion rates would be poorer than normal?
Incentive to create content, drive up impressions, drive up clicks and all that in the hands of your visitors (members)?
Innovative but a click fraud nightmare!
I would say this model is based too much on trust and the net profit must be low, with a high risk of loosing your account:
monthly $10k earnings: around $5k site owner share, will cost you at least $4k monthly fir professional moderators, stats and click monitoring and site general admin resources.. Net profit in the range of $1k monthly.
Plus: Only 15,000 members and $10k worth of monthly clicks? Is this normal?
There does seem to be a wide discrepancy among payouts for different sites.
Presumably in at least some cases this has to do with targeting, i.e. what search phrases are being matched to the ads.
I am pleased and sometimes even surprised that my earnings are as high as they are, but I am very skeptical of 78.5 for a number of reasons.
Don't believe everything you read - especially in the NY Times. I think that number doesn't give us any more reliable information than we had before the article printed.
For the others, I don't think there is any difference in payout percent between folks making $50 per month vs $50,000 per month.
Incentive to create content, drive up impressions, drive up clicks and all that in the hands of your visitors (members)?
Innovative but a click fraud nightmare!
I don't know how innovative it is. For instance, there was a site a couple years ago that allowed users to write articles and get a share of revenue from the ads on the author's article. Predictably, there were mostly ads on what were perceived to be expensive keywords. As an advertiser, I saw a very high number of clicks from this site and complained to Google several times. I don't know if my complaints had any effect, but the site was eventually dropped from AdSense.
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:56 pm (utc) on Jan. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]
People would be hesitant to click on their own adsense ads because Google has their secret police and advanaced algorithms to detect it. But here, apparently, you click on this guy's adsense account and he pays you for it? There is no risk because if worst comes to worst, his account would be banned, not yours.
i would imagine that google employs different percentage of revenue sharing based on earnings.
A sliding scale based on earnings may well be part of the compensation formuls.
But...
As I've often suggested, there could be more to it than that.
Google has never made any secret of its desire to make the Net a better place, or of the value that it places on information. Who's to say that the compensation formula doesn't reflect Google's corporate philosophy and idealistic goals? There could very well be an algorithm that looks for certain accoount, site, or page characteristics and adjusts the percentage split upward or downward based on what it sees. I'm not saying this is happening, but it could be happening--and why not, since Google has never promised a specific percentage of revenues to publishers?
So there's a possibility that the 78.5% figure is correct, or at least an officially released number. But IMO it's more likely that the number comes from a reading of Google's financial reports, the same source that previous estimates have come from.
2. AOL and ask jeeves are getting over 80% share.
3. In order to average out to 78.5% regular adsense publishers have to be paid less.
how much does google pay?
People would be hesitant to click on their own adsense ads because Google has their secret police and advanaced algorithms to detect it. But here, apparently, you click on this guy's adsense account and he pays you for it? There is no risk because if worst comes to worst, his account would be banned, not yours.
The revenue sharing hack works in the way that it rotates the AdSense ID used in the javascript code; so occasionally you will see a disabled AdSense block put up if the poster has had their account banned.
You don't know who's ad you are clicking on unless you look at the source code of the page. As a user, if you post a new thread, you will get a share of the revenue from that thread... but it is still exceptionally small.. a few dollars at month for a typical poster.
Google is quite aware of the site in question; any sort of click fraud would be quickly and privately dealt with, I'm sure. And I doubt there is $4k of moderation fees needed on the site; I believe they are volunteers. I'm sure a great deal of the AdSense traffic comes from use of their free SEO tools.
I would be very surprised if small publishers received more than 50% and I believe that many of us are paid between 30 and 40 percent. The figure I see most often talked about is 70%, but I think the amount paid to large premium publishers is where most of that money goes.
Also, you could in theory instigate a bidding war and increase the cost for an ad to appear on your site.
But you know what? Who cares! As long as my net cpm is blowing away other sources they could pay me 1% and I wouldnt give a hoot. It's all about the bottom line and so far Google delivers hands down over the comp.
What do they keep it secret for anyway? How do we know they don't decide to give us 40% one day, and 70% the next?
I think they ought to let us know.
