Google says AdSense will help publishing industry

Matt Brittin, search engine Google's UK director, said on Wednesday that the search engine giant has shared $5 billion with publishers through its contextual ads programme, AdSense, in the last year. Google has paid this amount to content providers such as magazines and newspapers, with Brittin saying that the company sent around a billion clicks a month to the websites of newspapers and magazines.

Google AdSense works by enabling website owners to display contextual advertising on their web pages. These adverts are administered by Google on a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression basis, with both Google and the website owner sharing the revenue generated whenever an advert is viewed by a visitor to the site.

Brittin said Google wanted to help content providers and publishers build their audience and monetise their products online. He hit back at critics who have accused Google of profiting from clicks through to news websites, claiming that Google's tools and expertise are ''part of the solution''.

''In a world where everyone is a publisher, what is needed more than ever is editing skills and brands that help people understand the quality of the content and help them to find the content that is useful,'' he told an audience of publishing executives at the World Magazine Congress in London on Wednesday.

''The challenge is the model of monetisation online and figuring out how to make that economically viable in the same way as print products are. Those models are lagging consumer behaviour and all of us are trying to keep up with the consumer.''

Brittin said that Google searches for magazines and other printed publications online had risen by almost 500 per cent in the last four years. He urged publishers to learn from the success of web-based e-commerce sites to gain a better understanding of how to engage with consumers and meet their needs.