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> This is cool for several reasons:

4. Google gets paid, rather than all the money going to the actual website.




This is just you buying the ad slot instead of the advertiser. Why should it be any different for the website's income?

If anything, more entities bidding for the ad means the prices can go higher and the website gets more money (though I imagine any difference here would be undetectable).


> Why should it be any different for the website's income?

Because the point is that a lot of people who block ads, don't actually like advertising. I would hazard a guess that they want to support websites, but they don't want to support advertising companies, and validate their business.


I believe that Google's cut of contributor is smaller than Google's cut of AdWords. (I did a quick search to verify and couldn't find it, so don't take my comment as gospel).


Why would it be smaller? If anything, it should be exactly the same, you're just outbidding advertisers with your own "ads".


I thought I read something somewhere that Google is deliberately taking a smaller cut to encourage adoption.


They are facilitating the entire process, processing the credit cards, cutting checks, sending tax forms... Even bitcoin transactions have fees.


According to you, what should be the fees?

Google's primary job is to make billions of dollars of profit. I believe an organization like that has all the more incentive to inflate the fees and pocket as much as possible.


I'm not sure I understand the question. It's up to each publisher to decide if they make enough on AdSense to justify putting its ads on their site. The success of Google's ad business suggests that even net of fees, many people still think it's worth it.

Now, personally, I don't think Google pays me enough to run AdSense on any of my sites. It's frankly not even close, so the fee isn't the issue -- it's just a bad fit for the volume and type of content I produce. I can see why it's great for many other publishers though.


Well, I understand an organization that sets up a network where content creators get paid incurs some costs. I was curious as to what people think is the appropriate amount of fees they should charge for that service.


Google's costs and fees are irrelevant to the content creator. They want the ad network that writes the biggest check each month, not the one with the lowest operating overhead.

In fact there are many niche ad networks with fees much higher than Google, but they actually pay publishers more because they also charge the advertisers much more.


Nothing destroyed the quality of web content as much as AdSense did. So many websites turned into "made for AdSense" and started doing stupid things that actually severely reduce their earning potential.




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