Google AdSense for Your Mobile Sites

You can now place ads on your mobile websites using Google AdSense. It's an internet marketer's dream. AdSense has traditionally been used on the desktop platform only allowing site owners to display related advertising on their site using a PPC model. The mobile edition is a limited availability beta release. It's no secret that the mobile market is hot with increasingly more people owning cell phones and an ever growing number of mobile websites being created to support this sales opportunity. AdSense is paving the way for the monetization of this new marketing channel by covering the bases on another of the much touted three screen views.

On the user experience side, this can equally be a designer and user's worst nightmare. Although screen sizes are increasing in size, there is still a very limited amount of screen real estate to work within and now with more content, albeit ads-y content, which may or may not be welcome by users. It's an interesting challenge both in the decision to serve ads and the usability implications. The placement of the ads are unlikely to fall in the right column as is traditionally the case on the desktop platform; they are more likely to fall towards the bottom of the page above the site footer with some differentiation between the main site content and what are essentially ads. There are apparently character and line limitations.

In terms of development, website requirements are that "webpages must be written in a mobile markup language and developed with a server-side scripting language such as PHP; AdSense for mobile ad code will only display ads on mobile-compliant webpages. Mobile Webpage Markup Languages: wml (WAP 1.x.), xhtml (WAP 2.0), chtml (imode, etc.)". (Source: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=71600&ctx=sibling)