You need enough content so that Adsense knows what ads to display and enough content to keep Google from thinking the page is just for ads. So I don't think there is a way around it.

My understanding is that if Google can't determine the context of the page, it places ads relevant to the general context of your site or sometimes relevant to its most popular pages. Interest-based ads also are likely to appear, which are relevant to your visitor but not necessarily to anything on your site.

It's not necessarily the case that ads unrelated to your page can't work.

The interest-based ad experiment has survived, so it must be working.

Also consider: what if you had an informational site targeted toward people learning JavaScript? What if you also knew that a large percentage of entry level people learning JavaScript were women between the ages of 18 and 30 (I don't know if that's true), who are more likely than the general population to have young children?

They would be a natural target audience for ads about disposable diapers, but there is no way to get those types of AdSense ads to appear on a page about JavaScript.

Even interest-based ads are unlikely to do it because it requires that the visitor has previously visited websites about disposable diapers, and how likely is that? Nonetheless, disposable diaper ads would be a good fit for the page's audience.

I've sometimes thought that this inability to target a demographic, with ads that would be relevant to a site's visitors but not to any of its topics, is one weakness of the perhaps too-strict contextual targeting model that AdSense imposes.

Maybe that's less of a concern if AdWords allows advertisers to target pages that are seemingly irrelevant to their ad's topic (such as creating disposable diaper ads to be placed on pages matching the keyword "JavaScript). I don't know if they allow that.

I agree with ember that Google might think your page, if it is really so thin on content, is primarily for displaying the ads and getting people to click on them, which is a no-no. I'd consider that a more important problem than the lack of ad targeting.

The best solution to both problems is to add enough useful and relevant text content to the page to make it clear that your content, and not the ads, is the focal point of the page.

The other thing of course is that there may be keywords on your page which attract more ads that the real content.

For example if you were offering classroom based Javascript classes you could end up with ads for plumbers in the town where the classes were being held. (A major city name will usually be "stronger" in this respect than a niche topic)

When I place a Google ad there, it shows a link of something entirely different from the few words already on the page.

The ads you see when you visit your page may be different than the ads your visitors see when they visit your page.

Also, pages with AdSense and little content are frequently a topic of controversy and sometimes reported to be a cause for AdSense to take action against the account. If you have pages with little content, you probably should consider not putting AdSense on those pages.

FarmBoy