Google Stripping Out Ads In Mobile Content

[by James Pearce] Russell Buckley has pointed out that when Google changes websites to make them fit on mobile phones it strips out the advertising…at least that’s what happened in these before and after shots.

“For a publisher, or a content owner, this is pretty hard. For the most part, online publishing is all about selling ads round the content. Any publisher who needs to make money from his site (ie they are a business) has to sell those ads, or the site will disappear – it’s that simple. So by stripping these ads out, Google is effectively depriving publishers of income. You can’t argue (like Google News) that you’re sending traffic to sites by offering a taster of the content. They are simply taking traffic away from exposure to the publisher’s advertising.”

The ad in question wouldn’t work very well on a mobile phone but it’s beside the point — browsers are meant to access the web, not change the content. If companies do start getting a lot of hits through here it’s worth making a mobile-specific website, with appropriate advertising, to avoid this issue.

The GoogleBlog on the topic is here.

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