Yahoo, Adobe team on PDF ads

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe's Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo's ad serving system and then monitor the performance through Yahoo's system. Publishers take a cut of the revenue from each click on the ads and Yahoo will split its share of the revenue per click with Adobe.

The service gives PDF publishers access to Yahoo's network of advertisers and allows them to make money off the content without having their own sales force or having to do the ad insertion themselves, says Josh Jacobs, vice president of publisher solutions at Yahoo.

Publishers participating in the beta include IDG's InfoWorld, which moved to a Web-only format earlier this year, as well as Wired, Pearson's Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier.

Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo lets PDF publishers put ads next to their content.

(Credit: Yahoo)