So google is a public company so they disclose all their revenue sources and cost of those revenues. Using the below data: http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html You can see that in 2008 google pulled in 21.7 billion in revenue, 97% of this revenue came from google adwords, some 21.1 billion. That means that google takes in 21 billion from advertisers. The big question is how much of that 21 billion is google paying out to adsense? The first thing we can cut off is google's profit which is about 6.6 billion, which leaves us with 15.1 billion that goes into costs of operating the corporation. Google then spends 6.5 billion on general administration, R&D, and marketing. Which leaves us with 8.6 billion. What this means is that every dollar spent by advertisers on google adwords, google keeps 60% of the money and then gives the adsense advertisers 40%. So for every 100$ you get from adsense, an advertiser had to pay 250$ for that advertising! Seems a little ridiculous considering most of the money google gets is wasted on other non-profitable ventures (ie. blowing a billion on youtube).
A lot of that 21.7 billion is from adwords running along google search results I think, so they aren't paying out any of that to advertisers. I'd say google gives somewhere between 25% to 40% for each click they get from adsense. Yes, google is a big middle man leaching money out of the economy, and you should cut them out every chance you get by offering cheaper advertising directly to companies you see advertising using adsense, or monetizing with affiliate programs. Youtube is about to turn profitable, facebook just did.
yea but for every 1$ google takes into adsense they are taking well over 75% of that. So that only leaves you with 25 cents. Harison that is very true or try other forms of advertising where the advertising company doesn't take as much. I wonder how much YPN takes.