Search Revenues Per Click (Google and LookSmart)

Working at a search engine company, it's interesting to see what other search companies are making on searches. So, just how much is a search or a click worth? Doing a little research, it's not hard to find out.

Looking at public financial information from LookSmart's shareholder earnings report, we see:

LookSmart earned $9.2 million in 3Q 2005 on 70 million paid clicks, which comes out to $0.13 per click. The company states that their revenue per clic was $0.15 per click excluding their Run On Site (ROS) product.

Google's revenue per search is reported on John Battelle's Search Blog. In Q3 2004, Google earned $0.09 per query (a different metric from LookSmart's revenue per click).