Google's help page on the AdSense revenue share is short. It says that for AdSense for Content, publishers receive 80 percent of the revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee. When advertisers buy through Google Ads, the page adds, publishers keep about 68 percent.1 It also says AdSense pays publishers an effective cost per mille, the industry's rate per thousand impressions, for advertiser bids. Those sentences describe an AdSense income in full: a share set by Google, of a price set in an auction, times a count of impressions supplied by the site. A publisher who wants to depend less on that income needs another buyer whose price depends on something other than the count.
The published share is a share of what remains after a buy-side fee
The arithmetic behind the 68 percent appeared on Google's own blog on November 2, 2023. Google Ads, it said, would retain on average 15 percent of advertiser spend, and publishers would receive 80 percent of the revenue after that fee.2 Eighty percent of the remaining 85 percent is 68 percent, the figure the post gives for what publishers using AdSense have kept. Beside that public figure sits the share on the AdBubbles pricing page. Publishers keep 70 percent of what advertisers pay for the campaigns that run on their pages, and AdBubbles keeps 30 percent.
Per-impression payment leaves the publisher one variable
The same post announced that AdSense "will soon transition from primarily paying publishers per click to the display industry standard of paying per impression," expected early the following year.2 An impression is one ad shown once, whether or not anyone acted on it. Under per-impression payment, the count is the variable the publisher controls. The rate per thousand is set by advertisers bidding in an auction the publisher does not run.
Suppose a site draws 20,000 views a month, paid at whatever rate the auction produces. Doubling the income means doubling the views or doubling the rate. The first is something the publisher can do. The second depends on which advertisers bid, on what Google Ads retains, and on the share that follows. Dependence, then, is an income in which the rate and the share are set by one company's auction and one company's fee schedule.
Eligibility and the payment threshold describe the site AdSense expects
Four conditions appear on the eligibility page. The first is content that is high-quality, original, and attracts an audience, and the second is compliance with the Program policies. The third is an applicant at least 18 years of age, and the fourth is access to the HTML source code of the site.3 None of the four concerns the size of the site.
The payment threshold does. A separate help page says a publisher is paid out when outstanding earnings reach the threshold, and its table gives US$100 for accounts paid in US dollars.4 A site earning less than that in a month is paid in the month its outstanding earnings reach the figure. The terms are the same for every site; what differs is how long each waits.
The buyer on the other side of the auction is described on a Google Ads help page. Display campaigns, it says, "can reach people worldwide across 35 million websites and apps."5 Their Optimized targeting "uses information such as keywords on your landing page to help you reach new and relevant audiences." A site is then one of 35 million places an ad may appear, and an income drawn from that buyer follows the network's decisions rather than the site's.
A different buyer pays for the words rather than the views
An income stream reduces dependence when it comes from a different kind of buyer, not from another ad unit sold into the same auction. On AdBubbles, advertisers buy words, not audiences. AdBubbles sets no cookie, stores no identifier, and collects no personal data from readers. An advertiser chooses a keyword, a creative, and a target, which is the whole network, one category, or named sites. The keyword is then held on each targeted site for a calendar month. A word taken on a site is shown to other advertisers as taken, with the next free month.
Opening a publisher account costs nothing, and so does adding the embed. The embed is one script, adbubbles.js, which underlines the first occurrence of each bought word inside the scope the publisher configured. The publisher pages describe verification by DNS TXT record, meta tag, or uploaded file. After verification, a publisher can request a crawl showing which of the site's words are currently sellable. The how it works page sets out the seven steps and the privacy position.
A bubble is the small panel that opens from the dotted underline under a bought word, and an open is a bubble that stayed visible for one second. Earnings are shared among the sites a campaign ran on in proportion to opens, accrued daily, and paid monthly through Stripe Connect in the publisher's own currency. Packages are prepaid by the month, and a campaign that starts mid-month is prorated. AdBubbles matches words on a page to the advertiser who bought them, and does not choose which people see an ad, follow a reader between pages or sites, or promise any result.
Tracking added about 4 percent to one publisher's revenue
A paper presented at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security in 2019 measured what tracking adds to an ad's price. Veronica Marotta, Vibhanshu Abhishek, and Alessandro Acquisti examined millions of advertising transactions on websites owned by a large media company during a week in May 2016. When a user's cookie was available, they found, the publisher's revenue increased by only about 4 percent.6 The authors called the paper a preliminary draft, and it covered one company over one week. Within those limits, a buyer who pays for the words on a page, and for nothing about the reader, is paying for the larger part.
Publishers already expect fewer of the views that per-impression payment counts
The Reuters Institute surveyed 280 senior media people in 51 countries in November and December 2025.7 Display advertising remained a revenue focus for 68 percent of them, behind subscription and membership at 76 percent. The same respondents expected traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40 percent over the next three years. For a network that pays per impression, that expectation is a forecast of the variable itself. Pew Research Center's digital news fact sheet, citing eMarketer estimates, records that U.S. digital display advertising revenue in 2022 "continued to be dominated by just a few companies."8 Meta held 37 percent of the segment, Google 10 percent, and Amazon 6 percent.
A per-impression network pays for views, the publishers surveyed expect the views arriving from search to shrink, and the segment the views are sold into is dominated by a few companies. The words on a site's pages are the one input in that arithmetic that the site owns outright. A market that sells those words, one keyword on one site for one month, fixes its price before the month begins rather than in an auction during it. In the publishers' own forecast, search traffic falls. The part of a site's income priced by the page rather than by the view is then the part whose share grows, whichever buyer supplies it.