Does Hubpages Take a Percentage of My Other Webpages in Google Adsense, or Just the Hubpages Ones?
Revenue Sharing
Some hubbers have asked: does hubpages take a percentage of my adsense earnings from all my sites, or just the articles I publish on Hubpages.com?
Hubpages does not actually take a percentage of your Google Adsense earnings at all. Your earnings are always all yours and Hubpages's earnings are always their own.
Hubpages uses a revenue sharing model. This means that every time someone views an article your publish on hubpages, the page will either load your adsense code or hubpages adsense code. If someone clicks on an adsense link while your code is displayed, you will earn money from adsense; Hubpages will earn nothing.
On the other hand, if someone clicks on an adsense ad, while hubpages' adsense code is being displayed, the money is earned by hubpages alone and you get zero.
On average your own ad is displayed 60% of the time and hubpages gets the other 40%.
Whether someone clicks on your ad or hubpages' ads is completely random.
This revenue sharing model only applies to hubs published here on hubpages.com. It has nothing to do with what you earn by installing the adsense code on your own blog or website somewhere else.
40 Percent isn't 40 Percent, Necessarily
Currently, Hubpages takes 40% of your adsense impressions. What this means is that for every 100 times that your page is viewed, 40 of those page views will display Hubpages Adsense code while the remaining 60% will display your adsense account.
If each visitor were to click on the adsense ads every time they load your hub, this would mean that you would get 60 percent of the adsense revenue while Hubpages would get the rest. But in real life, it doesn't work that way.
The 60/40 split of Adsense ad displays just means that, all things being equal, there is a 60 percent chance that someone will clcik on your ad as opposed to an ad belonging to Hubpages. But all things are not equal: people do not click on ads in a predictable and even manner; they are influenced by a number of other factors including the text of the adsense ad that happens to be displayed. Sometimes they do not click at all.
Therefore, if you get 100 visitors and only 5 click on an ad, there is no way of predicting whether the ad revenue will be split 60/40. What can happen is that all 5 of these clicks may go to you or to hubpages, depending on which adsense account is being displayed. As a result, you can get a lot of revenue from a few clicks, or you may get no clicks at all, if they all go Hubpages.
Does this mean that you shouldn't publish articles on websites that use a revenue sharing model? That depends. If you can build your own website and attract visitors to it, you may be better off keeping alld of the ad revenues for yourself. But the advantage of revenue sharing sites such as Hubpages is that they have high traffic and therefore there is a better chance that your article will be read and will generate ad revenue for you.
So the percentage of the adsense profits that you give up on an adsense revenue sharing site can be viewed as the price of doing business. You should ask yourself - will the site I publish on generate enough traffic and revenue for me so that I am better off here than on my own site?
These articles may help you to better understand how hubpages and revenue sharing works.
Links to Sites About Adsense Revenue Sharing
- Hubpages.com F.A.Q.
This is the official explanation of how revenue sharing works. - How Revenue Sharing Works
This is a hub I wrote that talks in greater deatail about how the revenue sharing model works. - A List of Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites
A big list of sites that reward users for posting articles and other contents by letting them share in adsense revenue. - Adsense Revenue Sharing
This article lists a number of other sites and blogs which use the revenue sharing model. You might want to compare which site offers the best options for you.