Meet mobile publisher Mikle

In September, we introduced AdSense for mobile content to provide a simple solution for increasing revenue from your mobile sites. We recently interviewed Jaehong Lee from Japanese mobile site Mikle to find out more about his experience with using AdSense for mobile content.

Currently, Mikle's bulletin boards attract over a million unique visitors each month. With user-generated content ranging from entertainment to nutrition, Jaehong had been looking for a manageable way to monetize Mikle's mobile pages. He found his answer when he began using AdSense for mobile content this year.

Jaehong highlights the performance and convenience of AdSense for mobile content, stating that "the performance of AdSense has been way better than our expectations. Moreover, the features for managing ad performance are easier and more convenient than other ads services. It saves a lot of effort for us in managing and monitoring ads."

With features such as editorial review and the Competitive Ad Filter, AdSense for mobile content has saved Mikle substantial time. Jaehong explains, "We hire people to check all messages and comments posted on our site. The cost of this work was significant... AdSense for mobile content’s great performance lets us be free of a lot of work from managing ad performance. We now have firm profitability and can concentrate our resources on the efforts of service development and operation improvements."

To learn more, please visit our new AdSense for mobile content page.

UPDATED to fix typo

Sounds of success for Buenamusica

In just three years, Manuel Treto's Buenamusica.com has become quite a successful enterprise. A U.S. based Spanish-language site dedicated to everything associated with music, Buenamusica.com now receives around 100,000 unique visitors per day from users around the world.

When Manuel first started, he knew he needed an ad network that would deliver both English and Spanish ads relevant to his U.S. Hispanic and Latin American visitors -- a one-stop shop with domestic and international inventory. "This was one of our biggest hurdles for monetizing the website," Manuel says. "Several of the networks I tried billed themselves as 'Hispanic networks', but after testing fifteen different ad networks on our site, we were happiest with AdSense. AdSense is better for Hispanic publishers because it usually outperforms all other ad networks by at least 50 percent in earnings, even those ad networks that are specifically targeted toward Hispanic sites."

With a staff of only five people, Manuel and his colleagues wanted a product that could adapt to their needs without requiring significant development resources. "The product's flexibility in terms of customization options is its most impressive feature," says Manuel. "What has worked the best for me is incorporating colors that are already associated with the site. We try to customize everything so that it matches the look and feel of the site, and users have commented on how nicely the ads fit into the page."

Manuel now employs AdSense ads on 100 percent of his pages. He also offers his users the ability to navigate through his site with the Google Custom Search Engine, which he has linked to his AdSense account. This has allowed him to monetize his search results and to generate additional revenue for the site. "The more exposure you give to Google the more money you are going to make, and every little bit adds up. I strongly recommend using other Google products. Using the Custom Search Engine feature is bringing a little bit of Google technology to your website, and you can't beat that."

If you'd like to share your own success story with us, please fill out our questionnaire. If you're not yet an AdSense publisher and would like to get started with Manuel's suggestions, you can submit an application today.

AdSense in fashion for those who wear many hats

Here's another AdSense Story Contest submission, this time from internet entrepreneur Shawn Collins of New Jersey.



Shawn has been an affiliate marketer since 1997, and joined AdSense in 2003 after he found it to be a natural extension for monetizing his websites. He wears a lot of different hats as an Internet marketer -- not only is Shawn the co-founder of the Affiliate Summit conference, but he also runs the Affiliate Buyer's Guide and is an affiliate himself.

Before AdSense, Shawn relied on running affiliate ads and selling space on a CPM basis. This could be hit or miss, as he would manually try to place ads that were the best fit. As his sites grew, he would sometimes forget about a time-sensitive ad, and that ad slot would become wasted space. "With the contextually served ads from AdSense," Shawn says, "my advertising is always fresh and spot on."

Shawn also blogs daily about affiliate marketing and maintains an affiliate manager resource site. His audience is savvy, since they're internet marketers as well, so he considers it essential that targeted, relevant advertising is served up to his visitors. According to Shawn, "AdSense is an ideal solution for my varied web properties, and I work with AdSense for content, AdSense for search, referrals, and video units."

As Shawn mentions in his video, one of the highlights of his day (sometimes many times a day) is when he logs in to his AdSense account. He likens it to holding a lottery ticket as he waits for his daily earnings to be revealed. "I try to guess the daily total, based on my past performance, which makes the whole process a little more fun. When I experiment with new placements or have a particularly good day with my traffic, it's always a thrill to see my milestones measured in AdSense commission spikes."

Driving up placement targeting earnings

Carsurvey.org is a car review website published by CSDO Media Limited. Initially inspired by some of the earliest experiments in user-generated reviews, the site now hosts almost 100,000 English-language car reviews submitted by visitors from across the globe.

From 1997 to 2000, founder Steven Jackson ran the site as a hobby. However, the growing hosting costs became significant, so Steven opted to run ads to cover them. He joined the AdSense program and was impressed with the initial results, which were further improved by carefully optimising the location, colour and size of the ads. By 2005, the time demands of running a popular website while holding down a day job were no longer sustainable. The steady revenue from AdSense was a major factor in Steven's decision to leave his old career and devote himself full-time to running Carsurvey.org.


AdSense offered Steven many advantages. Its global reach matched Carsurvey.org's diverse user base, and the fact that it separated the selling of ad space from the management of the site was very important to maintaining the sites' independence and credibility. Steven says, "AdSense allows me to focus on running Carsurvey.org for visitors. As long as Carsurvey.org provides a useful service, AdSense helps pay the bills."

Ad placements

As a regular reader of Inside AdSense, Steven was quick to pick up on improvements to the custom channel feature, which allows advertisers to target specific site areas using ad placements. He updated his AdSense HTML code to highlight his site via ad placements and focused on the most important pages and locations within Carsurvey.org. This made the site more appealing to advertisers, as they could begin to target specific page locations and sections. In addition, it gave more prominence to Carsurvey.org in the AdWords site tool, as you can see in the image below.


Medium rectangles

In addition to implementing the ad placements, Steven also tried another AdSense optimisation tip and added more image-enabled 300x250 medium rectangle units to his site. Though initially skeptical, as using those units would mean both changing the page layout for all of Carsurvey.org and displaying fewer ads per page, Steven decided to give the change a try.

Accelerating revenue

The improvements were gradual at first, but soon Steven's revenue climbed as advertisers began targeting specific ad placements on Carsurvey.org, namely the new 300x250 units in prime locations. Within a few months, Steven saw his placement targeting revenue grow up to six times its previous level; it now represents 60-80% of his overall earnings.

"I can definitely recommend experimenting with the ad placements and image enabled ads, especially in the 300x250 and skyscraper formats recommended by Google. I thought Carsurvey.org was pretty well optimised, but this just shows that experimenting with AdSense ad placements and testing out new features can really pay off," says Steven.

Building with AdSense