Yup, a mobile site optimizes your page that’s smaller and easier to navigate. In responsive design, the device does the work and automatically adjusts according to a device’s screen size (large or small) and orientation (landscape or portrait). It switches between these options on-the-fly.

I’m using mobile site (wptouch). It’s only been 2 weeks and I don’t see much of a difference in earnings.

How it affects your earnings probably depends in part on how much of your traffic is mobile.

I prefer a mobile first responsive site. A mobile first responsive site displays the exact same content for every visitor. Your stylesheets display different layout according to the device and orientation (landscape/portrait). Earnings from mobile devices/tablets have increased significantly.

I think it depends on how much time/staff you have to maintain your site. Potentially, with a dedicated mobile-only version of your site, you could be maintaining two versions of your site. That (depending on how much content your site has) could be a lot of extra work.

I've created a new version of my site with responsive design so that it works on any device. Google indexes each page once, and they display what's appropriate for each user depending on the device they're using. No need to create a separate site with responsive design.

Hope that helps.

I'm all for responsive designs now. No need to have multiple templates, detection scripts, etc. Keep it simple.

When I switched my biggest site to a responsive design revenue dropped but only slightly (I can't remember the exact amount but it was less than 10%). At the time I was getting something like 40% mobile visitors, it's closer to 50% now (8 months or so later).

Responsive.

I have a lot of experience with mobile versions, first f all the offcial Google recommendation is a responsive website, which is a good solution most of the times ( but not all the time, depends of the website and it's mobile functionality).

a different mobile version has few downsides like :
1. two version maintenance
2. technically more complicated to manages redirects and optimize for search.

on the other hand optimizing ads for mobile is not the same as optimizing ads for desktop, so that is an advantage for mobile website.