What Percentage Does Google Make from AdSense?

Whenever a visitor clicks on a Google ad that a webmaster displays on his site, Google gets a percentage of the revenue the webmaster makes. So how big is the piece of pie Google takes for itself? Google doesn’t really tell so far, but according to the New York Times today, it’s about 78.5%:

“Google.com and the company’s foreign search sites contribute more to Google’s bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.”

I wonder if that’s true... it’s quite a large amount. Then again, if AdSense doesn’t pay well for a webmaster, she might simply remove the ad and switch to another ad system. In that case, Google doesn’t make a dime. (I removed AdSense from several sites because it just doesn’t pay that well.) I guess the only thing that would make Google lower their commission would be even stronger competition in the automated ads business.

[Thanks Didier Durand, who has a French post on this.]

Source: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-01-16-n19.html