Google AdSense

In April 2003, Google announced the acquisition of Applied Semantics, a software company based in Santa Monica, California. The company’s products were built on its patented CIRCA technology, including a product named AdSense that helped web publishers identify the themes of a page in order to serve relevant ads; Google said the company’s products and engineering team would strengthen its search and advertising programs, with the team remaining in Santa Monica.⁠[1]

On June 18, 2003, Google issued a press release from Mountain View, California, expanding its website advertising monetization program with Google AdSense, which let website publishers serve ads precisely matched to the content of their pages. Publishers applied online and, once reviewed by Google’s editorial team, gained access to its network of more than 100,000 advertisers; sites with more than 20 million page views per month were eligible for premium service, with early premium partners including ABC.com, HowStuffWorks, About.comPeople Inc.People Inc. is an American digital and print publisher, formerly Dotdash Meredith and renamed on July 31, 2025, whose 40-plus brands include PEOPLE, Better Homes & Gardens, Food & Wine, Allrecipes and Investopedia; its parent, formerly IAC, renamed itself People Incorporated (Nasdaq: PPLI) on June 4, 2026.Open the full entry and CNET.⁠[2]

The program initially centered on text ads, paid publishers per click, and supported only English-language websites.⁠[3][4]

In 2005, Google raised the publisher revenue share for AdSense for search.⁠[5]

That August, the AdSense system began supporting cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding; from September it successively introduced an image ads option, link units and sign-up integration with Blogger, and in November it launched a referrals feature and allowed up to three ad units per page.⁠[6]

In July 2006, Google’s AdWords Quality Score began assessing the content of ads’ landing pages. Afterward, “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites, pages with little content and many ads, fared worse, and a webmaster on the WebmasterWorld forum observed that scraper sites copying others’ content were taking their place.⁠[7]

In May 2007, Google notified some high-earning AdSense publishers that their accounts would be closed on June 1 for an “unfit business model,” while still paying out their accumulated earnings. Early discussion centered on ad-arbitrage sites; Plagiarism Today writer Jonathan Bailey concluded that the main targets were low-quality MFA sites with no substantive content, relying on scraped feeds or machine-generated text.⁠[8]

On May 24, 2010, Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of product management, disclosed AdSense’s revenue shares on the Inside AdSense blog: AdSense for content publishers received a 68% revenue share worldwide and AdSense for search partners 51%; he said the content revenue share had never changed since its launch in 2003.⁠[5]

On AdSense’s tenth anniversary, June 18, 2013, Susan Wojcicki, then Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce, said the AdSense publisher community had grown to more than two million publishers and that publishers had earned more than $7 billion from AdSense in the previous year.⁠[4]

In early July 2018, Google marked AdSense’s fifteenth anniversary in the publisher dashboard. Around the same time, Google renamed AdWords as Google Ads and merged DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange into Google Ad Manager.⁠[9]

On November 2, 2023, Google announced that AdSense would move from mainly paying per click to the display industry standard of paying per impression, and would split its revenue share into separate buy-side and sell-side rates: AdSense for content publishers would receive 80% of revenue after the buying platform’s fee; when Google Ads was the buyer, it would retain on average 15% of advertiser spend, leaving publishers with about 68% overall. Google said the changes would take effect early the following year and required no action from publishers.⁠[10][11]

From 2024, AdSense introduced an Offerwall beta and the Ad Intents format; from November 6, 2025, an Authorized Buyers system replaced the earlier ad network blocking control.⁠[3]

In April 2026, Google announced that from April 20 AdSense would experiment with an updated list of commonly used ad technology partners, to be made permanent on or after June 5 if it benefited publishers, with an option for publishers not to include them automatically. On April 13 of that month, Offerwall became generally available on AdSense.⁠[12][3]

In July 2026, Google notified publishers that the Related Search format in Auto ads would be retired on August 6, with other Auto ads formats unaffected.⁠[13]

As of October 2026, the AdSense Program policies prohibit publishers from clicking their own ads or artificially generating clicks or impressions by any means; the inventory value section of the Google Publisher Policies prohibits ads on screens without publisher content or with low-value content, on screens that mainly embed or copy others’ content without commentary or curation, and on screens with more ads than publisher content.⁠[14][15]

Google AdSense: Official website: https://adsense.google.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Official account: https://www.youtube.com/user/InsideAdSense (opens in a new window)⁠[16]