Seventy-eight and a half cents on the dollar is the amount Google pays its publishers for displaying ads on partner sites, according to a new article in the New York Times.
Reporter Bob Tedeschi calls this the company’s “shadow payroll” and says you can be part of it, too:
“Feeling depressed because you missed out on Google’s stock bonanza? Not to worry. Just get on the company’s shadow payroll. Hundreds of thousands of people have essentially done just that by starting blogs, forums or other informational sites and getting paid for posting ads on Google’s behalf. And while the money they earn might not be enough for them to buy, say, a share of Google’s stock, such revenues are growing.”
Wait, you mean there’s a thing called AdSense?! You. Are. Blowing. My. Mind.
Sorry, kidding.
The article does actually make some interesting points about declining search inventory and Google’s recent efforts to fix AdSense’s flaws. There’s even a few choice quotes from Forrester analyst Charlene Li, including this one about Google’s long-term strategry:
“I’ve called Google the one trick pony for a long time, and for the most part they still are. But they really see AdSense as the next frontier.”
On a related note, it seems that even though there’s been lots of Baidu buzz, Chinese searchers still prefer Google.
$0.785 per dollar is what Google pays “its publishers for displaying ads on partner sites”. Is that their pay-out rate for Ad-Sense? Or more likely, an inflated pay-out for a very limited group of publishers who’ll in turn syndicate their content and Ad-Sense listings to their own network of partner sites (syndication, rss, etc.) It sounds like an inflated payout offered to a select group of partners, in order to increase Google’s contextual reach exponentially.