Google AdSense for Mobile Now Under Beta Testing

If you are an ad publisher who has been waiting for a way to bring revenue to your mobile phone-capable website, Scott over at the Self Made Minds blog has announced Google Adsense for Mobile is currently in beta stage and undergoing testing. Up until now, there was really only one option with the service AdMob, but Google’s entry into the mobile advertising market is setting out to change that.

AdMob has been available for mobile publishers for over a year and has already attained more than 4 billion ad views in over 160 countries, giving it a rather large head start over the search engine giant that popularized text ads. The new Google AdSense for mobile, however, represents the first truly self-serve model for ad publishers, especially those smaller ones who do not have the resources that large companies have to spend.

Scott was invited by email to join the AdSense mobile beta testing program, which has currently only been offered by Google to a select group of mobile content publishers and site owners. Advertisers who wish to have their ads included in AdSense mobile, can find more information direct from Google at the AdWords Mobile Ads Help Center.

An excerpt from the email Scott received reads:

“As part of our efforts to develop new and improved AdSense products for our partners, we will begin a limited beta test for AdSense for mobile. AdSense for mobile allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites through the placement of targeted text ads. Publishers can take advantage of the fast-growing mobile advertising market and benefit from our targeting technology.”

By the time AdSense mobile opens for public use, the number of mobile sites and the amount of available mobile content should be on the rise, considering that content producers and advertisement publishers will have a much more efficient solution to monetizing mobile sites.

According to Russell Beattie, Google drives the majority of the traffic to his mobile site, with traffic dropping by 90% when he made an error and the GoogleBot stopped indexing his site.

“I get indexed by the mobile bot versions of Yahoo!, Microsoft, JumpTap, Ask, and others, and yet all of them together don’t drive 1/5th of the traffic that Google Search does - GOOG just completely owns the mobile web.”

Talk about a major change. It seems that Google has already managed to monopolize on the mobile content market just as well as it has with the standard version of the web and AdSense and AdWords.

What does this mean for the future of AdMob? Will Google be able to take over the mobile ad market that it has been slow to implement into AdSense? Will Google be able to help the mobile web finally catch on, build content and become the great “information anytime, anywhere” service it is supposed to be? Voice your opinion.