Well there's at least a couple kinds of stickiness.

One is, once they get to your site, they stick around for long periods of time reading or looking up stuff.

The other is to become a bookmarked resource that they'll come back to over and over again.

Most of my event sites are really great for the second, not so much for the first. But that's the nature of event sites.

Adsense and site stickiness may be an oxymoron :o)

Afterall, to earn more money with Adsense, you want them to click on your ads ... and that means saying bye bye to your site.

And to come "over and over again" -- are these the types of users who develop ad blindness and not likely to click on ads? They may be good for CPM type ads, but not for CPC

I think the better question with regards Adsense is: how do you achieve site stickiness when you're monetizing your site with Adsense?

1. Content. I offer evergreen content not found anywhere else (that is, until the pages get scraped) and have 'regulars' as well as SE referrals that come back everyday to see what's new

I agree with everything except "evergreen" and "new".

I haven't added anything new for just on ten years now and I simply can't be bothered.

Hasn't affected me much.

Afterall, to earn more money with Adsense, you want them to click on your ads ... and that means saying bye bye to your site.

If you use DoubleClick for Publishers (Google AdManager) you can set target=_blank on ads so you won't lose visitors anymore.

Thanks all for the replies, very interesting. I'm trying to offer my visitors the best possible site in my niche and yes, I'm also trying to monetize it primarily with AdSense (which overall has brought me more $ than I ever imagined the program was capable of when I signed up in 2004 - thanks Google! :-). Facebook integration and mobile seem to be the new arenas to get up to speed. Facebook for the potential buzz it can generate about your site and mobile because iPhones and the other smartphones are set to one day (probably sooner than later) be the dominant way people hit the web.

If you use DoubleClick for Publishers (Google AdManager) you can set target=_blank on ads so you won't lose visitors anymore.

Or move to China where it is set to open in a new window as default.