A visitor asked, via a search engine query, for a guide to Google AdSense revenue sharing on the Drupal blogging platform. I’m answering a much more general question: how to share blog ad revenue.

There are two parts to this question:

  1. What percentage revenue share do you give out?
  2. How do you set up your blogging platform to share ad revenue amongst contributors?

The first part is rather difficult to answer. If you are not paying your contributors a per-post flat fee, then your revenue share may range from 20%-100%, under certain conditions. I know some blog owners who are paying 80% plus a small token sum per post.

I know that the range of 40%-100% is rather difficult to choose from. What you have to decide is what each party is offering the other. If your site tends to already get a lot of traffic, maybe you are targeting new, unproven blog writers who are willing to take less. Some online communities state that before you get a share of the ad revenue, you must post anywere from 20, 50, or even 100 entries.

This is a very difficult percentage to settle on. However, my experience in the publishing industry says that it should lean towards the high side, say 50-60% for new writers, and 70-100% for established writers. Presumably, you are giving them revenue share for contextual ads, such as Google AdSense, YPN, Adgenta, or Chitika (which can also be non-contextual).

If you have a high volume site, you might be able to secure additional non-contextual “showcase” ads, for which you will presumably keep the entire proceeds. Or not. Some networks offer 100% of ad revenue per article for the first month, to a maximum amount, then 50% afterwards. There is no reason you shouldn’t be willing to try diferent payment models until you find something that works. This idea is relatively uncharted territory, but online communities such as Sitepoint.com’s forums have managed make it work, and reward many thousands of contributors.

As for the technical aspects of sharing revenue, lets start with the bold statement that if you do not own the domain name on which your blog lives, you should forget about it. It’s simply too complicated and too much of a hassle, if not impossible, depending on your free host.

If, on the other hand, you own your own domain and are using an advanced blogging platform for which you can “plugin” modules or change the code directly, then you have a few choices. At present, I am only familiar with the inner workings of WordPress, Drupal and Blogger - the latter being unsuitable for ad revenue sharing. So my discussion now, and in the future, will focus on WordPress and Drupal. However, any OpenSource blogging platform can be modified, or a plugin written, to allow you to revenue share.

The general steps for revenue sharing are as follows:

  1. Choose a suitable ad program.
  2. Check with the appropriate team to ensure that revenue sharing is within their TOS (Terms of Service). I’ve already confirmed this with the Google AdSense and the Chitika teams.
  3. Acquire or write a plugin for your blogging platform. Drupal and WordPress both have this. I’ll try to list the relevant URLs on the “Resources” page of this blog. (See the tabs at the top of the page.)
  4. Choose a revenue share percentage and configure the plugin.
  5. Allow contributors to sign up for an authoring account on your blogging platform, either directly (themselves) or indirectly (through you).
  6. The revenue share plugin should then allow them to securely enter their publisher code for the ad network in question.
  7. For each contributor, whenever one of their posts is viewed by a visitor, the revenue-share plugin presumably records this. If the visitor clicks on an ad, this is recorded. If there is any per-impression ad revenue, this may or may not be  recorded, depending on the plugin, the platform, and the ad network.

I do not know the specifics of these plugins, as I’ve not yet signed up contributors to any of my sites, but I assume that they produce a monthly report detailing ad clicks per contributor, and some sort of breakdown of payment. I’ll update this post as I acquire more information.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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