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)

[lyfktmvy]

pathetic

so pdf files are now acting like a trojan backdoor virus. how pathetic can companies get? do the advertisers realize how much this hurts their business from people that boycott their products.

[skillingssucks]

How desperate is Yahoo? Talk about a clueless organization!

Pack it up, you're finished as a company!

[sismoc]

Advertising Is Out Of Control

Please leave me alone.
Please, please, please.
I beg you.
I am assaulted by advertising 24*7.
Go away.

[ethana2]

evince + libpoppler

...so, where does that put us?

[annanemas]

Defeats The Whole Purpose

Two main benefits of posting .pdf documents are the convenience of offline reading and documents that look good in print. Inserting dynamic ads negates both of these benefits. Might as well just stop posting .pdf's altogether and stick to the web page.

[jture]

just another reason why PDFs are bad

I hate PDFs anyway. They only frustrate users who want to be able to read the content without having to download and open it first. And the kiss of death is that they are not accessible to visually-impaired users without special encoding. I work for a government agency and we are not allowed to put PDFs on our website unless we provide an accessible equivalent. I wish PDFs would simply go away altogether! (And how ironic is it that CNET's partner, Tech Republic, issues so many of its ever-so-helpful articles as... PDFs??)

[Becktemba]

The FEEDJOURNAL a more elegant solution

Adobe and Yahoo should team up with the FEEDJOURNAL
it offers a much more elegant solution with RSS feeds into Adobe Acrobat.

Click Ads within an Adobe Acrobat? Maybe if your reviewing your morning RSS Feed Paper before you print it out with the FEEDJOURNAL (www.feedjournal.com)

You can see an example of what I'm talking about at:

http://www.newscloud.blogspot.com

[babdullah]

Another reason to leave Adobe

I still don't understand how it works exactly. Is it like one time static ads attached to the PDF file? In that case affect is minimal, but I doubt since charging advertisers would be difficult this way, and also that would not limit the ads to Adobe reader only but it should display in other readers as well. The other option is if online new ads are pushed to the PDF every time I open it. If it's the latter, this is just plain silly. I have to be connected to open the PDF file? And what if I just tell my Firewall block the packets ha ;).

Both ways, at times like these where people are switching to different PDF readers than Adobe, as it already take ages for Adobe reader to launch (and finsih updates!), shouldn't they be getting concerned more about keeping their market share rather than revenue increase?