Payments for Premium Service

[morpheus83]

I was wondering are premium adsense accounts paid the same way like normal accounts. Or is their payment Wire transfered or send thru an International courier.

[mailtojitendra]

HI

One of my friends who works in one of the major portal in India told me that Premium members are paid on per impression basis and not on clik basis, Just like other players, Considering the minimum payments on basis of cpm and looking at fact of 20 million page views the portal is making good money.

They have more payment options then normal Pulishers.

[europeforvisitors]

I wonder what they're being paid per impression?

[Silver Surfer]

Well, we know that Google buys advertising for their adwords program from most major ad agencies for at least $1.00 cpm. Therefore, a site meeting the minimum 20 million/month impression quota would earn $20K/month.

Silver_Surfer

[europeforvisitors]

A $1.00 CPM? That's abysmal. I wonder how much more the big portals or news & entertainment sites get for their Google Premium Partner ads? No wonder a lot of the big portal sites are covered with more ads than a NASCAR race driver's suit. :-)

[edited by: europeforvisitors at 2:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 2, 2004]

[loanuniverse]

I think that $1.00 CPM is low too, but big sites are not neccesarily targeted to competitive areas. I suspect that places like your former partner "about.com" are getting a much better CPM. In fact, I doubt if any really big site would go for $1.00, unless google commited to buying 100% of the inventory.

[europeforvisitors]

I suspect that places like your former partner "about.com" are getting a much better CPM.

Maybe. Still, when I see run-of-network banners and skyscrapers for dating services on Premium Partner sites--even for subtopics that should be able to find targeted advertising--I get the feeling that they're desperate for whatever ads and CPMs they can get.

[Silver Surfer]

The $1.00 cpm rate was just an example of the minimum rate that some premium sites may be earning given that this is the rate google is paying to ad agencies such as Fastclick. I'm sure that each premium partners cpm rate is negotiated and determined mainly based on site content.

[irock]

I heard that About.com's PC computing category gets $20 CPM! Who told you about $1CPM?

[irock]

Sorry, overreacted a bit.

[morpheus83]

I do not think they are paid on CPM basis. As $1 CPM is too less and sites having traffic above 20 million can easily get Doubleclick, Tribal etc for ads. Google also takes a certain percentage of commission. For eg - If an advertiser offers $ 1 Per click then google keeps (40 cents) and pays us the rest. Whereas in the case of premium advertisers google takes (30 cents or so) and pays them the rest.

[jonknee]

If I had 20M impressions with my current CPM, I could buy a medium sized island in about a year. Here's to the future!

[loanuniverse]

I think that we have to keep in mind that there is probably not enough inventory out there to supply a 20 million pageview site in all of the niches. Lets say a couple of sites sprung up that were all about "golden fuzzy widgets", which carry a high EPC because of scarcity. Pretty soon, the adwords accounts for the sellers of "golden fuzzy widgets" would be depleted. Then you would start showing PSAs or lower EPC ads for "green fuzzy widgets".

In a perfect world, the advertisers would adjust their budgets if the traffic was converting, but the adjustment would take some time to happen.

Loanuniverse <- Green fuzzy widget master

[Jenstar]

I asked Gokul (the speaker from AdSense at PubCon) this question. Official word is that most premium publishers earn on a EPC basis, while a few earn on a CPM basis.

[markus007]

Jenster was anything said about extending the premium publishers program? IE relaxing the 20 million pageviews rule...

[chrisuk]

Is that 20 mill pv rule actually set in stone or more of a ploy to stop sites with too low traffic applying and causing admin overload?

It seems to me this would be a good tactic to ensure you only get applicants with traffic, not necessarily 20mill pv's but say 5 mill, 10 or 15 which is large traffic nevertheless.

Has anyone in the adsense program doing 5+ million views but under 20mill per month ever been approached by Google, afterall they can see the traffic you are providing and must know if you are worth their time pursuing.

[europeforvisitors]

I can't see any real advantage to being a "Premium Partner" unless you've got enough quality traffic to allow better terms from Google. (And in any case, how would you know if the terms were better since Google isn't revealing its AdSense payout formula?)

I suppose some people might like the idea of being able to change the "Ads by Google" link to a generic "Sponsored Links" or "Advertisements" caption, but I don't see that as a benefit. (Anything that encourages potential advertisers to sign up with Google is fine with me.)

[loanuniverse]

I think a lot of companies have gotten burn with advertising, and they would much rather get into an agreement with the ad network for a specific CPM rate and not have to worry about anything else.

The benefit is that you can feel more confident about future cash flows. The downside is that you might be leaving some money on the table. In addition, I am sure that these are written agreements for at least a year with options to renew.