Flexible Revenue Sharing

Overview

As an AdSense Host API partner, you will place AdSense ad code on behalf of your users, and will have the opportunity to keep a percentage of the revenue generated by those ads. Some partners find that it works best to give all of the revenue to their users; each partner has the flexibility to determine the model that works best for their particular site.

You must clearly disclose your revenue share to users on your site prior to AdSense account creation or association. In addition, Google will display your revenue share to your users when they complete their AdSense application or confirm association. This information will also be displayed in the "Account Access" section of each user's AdSense account.

Which pages should I share revenue on?

Revenue sharing is appropriate to reinforce substantial content creation and continued user engagement, but it won't be effective for all types of pages. There isn't an exact formula to determine when to share revenue and each site will approach this decision differently.

For example, it probably makes more sense to share revenue with a user who maintains a lengthy blog than it does to compensate someone for listing their interests on a profile page. Where it may make sense to share revenue with a user who manages a forum, it may not for someone who just makes a post.

By allowing users to share in the revenue generated by their actions on your site, you are encouraging them to be more engaged with your program. It's important to develop a model for your site that best facilitates this engagement.

Which users should be eligible for the program?

Many of our partners choose to offer revenue sharing to all of their site's users. However, you may want to consider inviting only a subset of your users to participate in revenue sharing.

For instance, you may only want to expose AdSense sign-up once a user has made at least one blog post, or after a forum has a certain number of threads. Such policies would ensure that users have the potential to earn revenue through the program. Any participation requirements you set are up to you, and should be used to further encourage user engagement on your site. Such requirements should also be clearly communicated to your users.

Please keep in mind that if you only plan to offer AdSense to a subset of your users, only those users' pages will count towards our page view requirement.

Finally, if a user is not eligible for revenue sharing, they should not be able to access your AdSense sign-up pages. Once Google approves their AdSense accounts, users should see live ads on their pages and begin accruing revenue. Any eligibility reviews you plan on doing should happen prior to the user signing up for AdSense.

How much revenue share should I keep?

We encourage that you share the majority of the revenue with your users. A typical partner will share 75-100% of the revenue with their users, although some do retain more.

The more revenue you share with your users, the more they will be incentivized to create content on your site. The appropriate split will vary depending on your site offerings. For instance, a site that offers free hosting and page creation may want to receive a higher percentage of ad revenue than a program that requires users to pay for page hosting or doesn't actually host the content created.

While your site may generate considerable advertising revenue as a whole, please keep in mind that users will only earn revenue on their own pages. To make the revenue sharing experience compelling for your users, they must be able to earn a significant amount from their content.

Note: If your users can freely modify their pages' source code, we encourage you to share 100% of the revenue with your users. If users have access to the page source, they can place their own AdSense ads and have no incentive to place your ads and share revenue with you.

Whatever you decide to do regarding revenue sharing, you must make the following clear to your users:

  • the revenue share applicable for child pages
  • for which pages the revenue share applies
  • that revenue is shared on a per page basis