Google’s Record Earnings and the Blogger

With the recent reports of Google’s massive surge in profits ($369million) for the first quarter of 2005 I can’t help but wonder how much of it is due to bloggers like us.

Of course its a little arrogant of us to take all the credit – after-all they do have a few good income earners out there that are not blogging related – but a large part of their earnings is obviously from Adsense which is increasingly appearing on every second blog. This ABC News article says that most of the income is from text ads:

‘Google makes virtually all of its money from the text-based ads that are tied to online search requests. The company gets paid each time one of the links are clicked on Google’s home page or hundreds of other sites that display the ads.

The text-based ads, which are priced using an online auction system, are becoming more expensive. Advertisers bid an average of $1.75 per click in March, a 6 percent increase from February, according to Fathom Online, a research firm.’

Interesting. $1.75 per click is the average earning? I wonder how much of that $1.75 per click goes into the publisher’s pocket? If my 20 blogs are anything to go by we’re not getting much of it.

Of course no one really knows (outside of Google) what percentage goes to advertisers (or even if we all get the same revenue share as one another) but it does make you wonder how it gets split up – I wonder when the day will come when a Google employee is convinced to spill the beens and leak that kind of information.

Looking at my own Adsense stats for the first quarter – I’d say I’m doing ok. Whilst I didn’t have a six fold increase in what I earned from Google I did have a 300% increase in monthly earnings from January to March. Not a bad return (although the poor figures at the end of December make it look a little more impressive than it actually was).

In a semi related idea – wouldn’t it be fun if instead of paying cash to publishers that Google issued stock options!?