Many PPC professionals and content publishers have been dying to know how much is it that Google takes from its Adsense publishers. Google has decided to finally release some of those numbers. Content publishers’ revenue share is 68% and has not changed since 2003.

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.

Google claims that the 32% share that it takes from content publishers goes towards further investments in Adsense program. The search partners only get 51% share of the revenue. That number actually makes more sense, considering that the process behind is a bit more complicated and costly.

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.

This is exactly why all publishers need to test multiple sources of revenue to make sure they are getting the right amount of revenue for their efforts. Google’s 68% revenue share may look generous. In reality, it should be something close to 80-20, considering that content publishers have to work so hard to stay competitive these days. Of course, it’s not to say that Google should not get compensated for serving ads on publisher websites. The best way to approach this is by running Adsense against other ads to see whether it’s worth your while. Plenty of publishers have moved away from Adsense in the past to start selling their own ads. There is no reason not to do it as long as you can properly test your ads to maximize your revenue.