Om Malik looked up some of Google’s SEC filings and found the following information …
“Google has been paying more money every quarter to the affiliates. However, TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues generated by network sites is declining. For instance in quarter ending June 30, 2004, the company had paid out 80% of the revenues generated by its network. In quarter ending Sept 30, 2004, it was down to 79% and now in the December 2004 quarter, that number was down to 77%.
Now one way to read it is that, with their dominance on the contextual ad-market complete, they are doing the slow squeeze on the publishers. I hope not, since do no evil is their motto!”
His conclusion will likely ring true with a lot of “small publishers” (and bloggers). Many times in the last 6 months, I’ve heard from people who noticed an apparent declining slice of the pie in their monthly AdSense earnings some time ago.
Some have theorized that Google purposely gave us a larger slice in the “early days” to help accelerate adoption of AdSense and cement their position as the reigning monopoly. Then, months before the big IPO, the began to slowly keep more and more of the pie for themselves.
True or not, everyone seems to agree that we could really use some competition in this business.
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
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