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The AdSense revenue share
The AdSense revenue share: "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.
As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.
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.
We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we're still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.
We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression. Additionally, when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.
We’re continually working on helping you improve the returns from your site while giving you more control and insight into AdSense. For example, we continue to improve our technology so that we can deliver even better matched ads and attract even more advertisers to your websites. Additionally, we recently began providing more granular ways to find and review the ads on your site, as well as the ability to filter more ads by category. We’re also focused on finding other ways to make AdSense better for you. As you may remember, last December, we asked for your ideas and feedback on how we can make AdSense better. We received more than 600 suggestions and 35,000 votes, and we’ve been reviewing them all.
Keep an eye on this blog for updates about the new features we’re building to help you maximize your advertising revenues.
Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management
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Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone
Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone
When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog’s new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.
Highlights
How you look online is important, and everybody wants to look unique. With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:
- Beautiful new templates. We’ve designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates.[1]
- Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
- Hundreds of free, professional background images. We've paired up with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
- A single control to change all your design's colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
- Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog's preview in real time.
- A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
- Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer we use hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
- Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design's CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog's preview updated in real time.
- Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Want a design with rounded corners? We give it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.
Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates
Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates
With this feature, you can search Amazon directly from the Blogger editor and add pictures and links to Amazon products right into your posts. Your readers will earn you commissions whenever they buy the products you recommend, and if you don’t already have an Amazon Associates account, you can sign up for one for free without leaving Blogger.
If you’ve ever written a blog post about a book, recommended a gadget, or reviewed a toy you bought for your kids, you’ve likely gone through the process of drafting the post, opening up a separate window to go to find a site that sells the product, then going back to Blogger to paste the link to the product into the post editor.
Starting today, you can search the Amazon product catalog without leaving the Blogger interface and insert links to the products you find into your posts. Not only is the process of linking to products more efficient, but Amazon makes it easy for you to earn money whenever your readers actually buy the products you write about. This is known as an “affiliate program”, and it’s designed to let you recommend products you like to your audience — if they buy the product, you’ll earn a commission on that purchase. (For more on affiliate programs in general, here is a good overview at ProBlogger from this summer, and Darren’s “11 Lessons Learned” post about Amazon Associates is a good review of how to get the most out of the program.)
To get started, click on the Monetize tab for your blog and click “Amazon Associates”. Walk through the setup wizard, and add the Product Finder once you’re done.
Now for the fun part: when you are writing a post on Blogger, you’ll see an Amazon gadget to the right of your post editor (the “Product Finder”). You can search the Amazon product catalog from within Blogger — type in the name of the product you are writing about, and insert a link to the product, an image of the product, or an iframe containing the image, price details and a “buy it now” button. Every link that’s created contains your unique Associates ID, ensuring that Amazon will credit you for any purchases that result from readers clicking the link on your blog.
If you’re an existing Amazon Associate, completing this setup simply makes the Product Finder available on Blogger for you — you continue to earn the same referral rate from Amazon. New Associates receive the same referral rate from Amazon that they would have received if they signed up directly. If you’re not interested in earning a referral, you can still install the Product Finder: from the “Amazon Associates” page under the Monetize tab, click “I'll do this later — show me more Amazon options” and then click “Add the Product Finder” button.
A quick note about trust: affiliate programs work well when readers trust you. You should avoid promoting products simply because of the referral fee you might earn — readers may lose some of that trust if they sense your posts exist solely to make you money. You may also want to disclose to your readers that you will earn a commission on their purchase — some readers even prefer knowing that you benefit from their business.
There’s more information about this integration at Amazon.com, and the Amazon Associates blog has some more details. This integration is the result of months of collaboration between the engineers at both companies, and we’re very excited to share the results of this collaboration with you. Happy blogging!
Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates
Earlier this year we simplified the process for monetizing your blog by adding a “Monetize” tab in the Blogger app. We started with AdSense, which allows you to add contextual advertising to your pages; more recently we added AdSense for Feeds to help you generate revenue from the distribution of your blog via RSS and Atom. Today we launched a third option: direct integration with Amazon Associates to search Amazon’s product catalog and add links to products that earn you commissions when your readers buy products you recommend.
With this feature, you can search Amazon directly from the Blogger editor and add pictures and links to Amazon products right into your posts. Your readers will earn you commissions whenever they buy the products you recommend, and if you don’t already have an Amazon Associates account, you can sign up for one for free without leaving Blogger.
If you’ve ever written a blog post about a book, recommended a gadget, or reviewed a toy you bought for your kids, you’ve likely gone through the process of drafting the post, opening up a separate window to go to find a site that sells the product, then going back to Blogger to paste the link to the product into the post editor.
Starting today, you can search the Amazon product catalog without leaving the Blogger interface and insert links to the products you find into your posts. Not only is the process of linking to products more efficient, but Amazon makes it easy for you to earn money whenever your readers actually buy the products you write about. This is known as an “affiliate program”, and it’s designed to let you recommend products you like to your audience — if they buy the product, you’ll earn a commission on that purchase. (For more on affiliate programs in general, here is a good overview at ProBlogger from this summer, and Darren’s “11 Lessons Learned” post about Amazon Associates is a good review of how to get the most out of the program.)
To get started, click on the Monetize tab for your blog and click “Amazon Associates”. Walk through the setup wizard, and add the Product Finder once you’re done.
