The Washington Post has a good article on emerging businesses powered by AdSense. Most are small, with only a handful of employees. Examples:
- Podcastdirectory.com: $30-40K/year run rate.
- FreeWebLayouts.com (designs for use on MySpace): $10-20K/month.
- SeatGuru.com (info on plane configurations): $20-40K/month, including direct ad sales.
But the biggest winner of all is Google (surprise). In Q2 2006, they collected almost $1 billion (41% of their total revenue) from their network of AdSense customers.
Update from the comments… Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media, says:
No question that AdSense has become a legitimate revenue stream for a significant number of small web publishers. That said, there is a distinction between AdSense for Publishers (examples of which you’ve pointed to above) and AdSense for Search. The overwhelming majority of Google’s AdSense revenue is generated from search partners, including AOL and Ask.com. They still don’t make very much much money on the content side.
No question that AdSense has become a legitimate revenue stream for a significant number of small web publishers. That said, there is a distinction between AdSense for Publishers (examples of which you’ve pointed to above) and AdSense for Search. The overwhelming majority of Google’s AdSense revenue is generated from search partners, including AOL and Ask.com. They still don’t make very much much money on the content side.
Left by Peter Hershberg on July 28th, 2006