Russell Beattie

Ho-lee-crap.

I haven't looked at my logs in a couple weeks because they haven't changed all that much in the previous couple months. But I started analyzing the content today, and I just about had a heart attack - over the past two weeks my traffic has increased by an *order of magnitude*. I've gone from an average of around 5,000 daily mobile page views (plus another few thousand from PC browsers) to over 50,000 daily mobile page views. At first I thought maybe my logs were messed, and that a wayward bot had come in and started hammering my server looking like a phone. Nope - I triple-checked and it's all real devices.

What the hell happened!? Well, it turns out that from the day I started using Google's AdSense for Mobile (Sept 19th), they started indexing Mowser like crazy and driving tons and tons of mobile traffic.

I almost hesitate to post this, since it could be a nail in the coffin of other mobile ad services out there. Not only are Google's mobile ads competitive in terms of money earned, Google is helping drive tons of traffic as well to the sites that use their ads, effectively doubling or more the amount of money earned. I mean, look at that graph above, it's freaking insane. Maybe if your mobile site is already well ranked and getting decent search engine traffic already, it won't be a big difference, but obviously to my site it's meant a blast of traffic.

I'm not going to get too excited about this. What Google gives you, Google can easily take away. But wow, this is nice - my traffic has been dead over the past few months (since Google wacked me back in May). We'll see how long the good times last this time.

:-)

-Russ