Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Internet Marketing Systems	September 20, 2007

Google offers contextual ads on mobile phones

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Director, Mequoda Group, LLC

Get ready for a new way to make money online.

Google launched AdSense for mobile websites earlier this week, an advertising program similar to the popular contextual ads served on hundreds of thousands of websites across the globe.

Any website specifically designed for mobile browsers can now have Google Adsense, opening up a new revenue stream for willing publishers.

If you're unfamiliar with Google's Adsense, the service matches Google's text ads to a participating website. All it takes is a block of HTML to get started, and the publisher and Google start making money every time an ad is clicked. Here's an example of Adsense ads on a right navigation.

Google will likely generate much more advertising revenue as mobile browsers explode in popularity. The "world market for mobile marketing and advertising is expected to be worth about $3 billion by the end of 2007" and will reach $19 billion by 2011, according to ABI Research.

Publishers are invited along for the ride through Google's mobile Adsense. Although it is not the most profitable way to monetize your content, mobile Adsense is a great excuse to create a mobile website. The revenue may be meager at first, but you'll be ready to offer space to high paying advertisers when the industry explodes.

If you're interested in creating a mobile website, here are some guidelines to help. There are also tools for your resident coders, and Google's mobile webmaster guidelines will help your site get indexed. Check out Computerworld's mobile site for an example.

The mobile Internet is set to take off. The time to prepare is now.