Thursday, November 29, 2007

Yahoo and Adobe team up to put online ads in PDFs

http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20071129/tc_infoworld/93723_1

The way it works: "Publishers will upload to an Adobe/Yahoo portal the PDF files on which they want to display dynamic ads. The vendors will send the files back after reconditioning them to display dynamically generated Yahoo text ads whenever a Web site visitor calls them up."

Benefit for PDF publishers - Publishers will offer ad space to advertisers on their PDFs.
Benefit for advertisers: A new advertising channel for them.
Benefit for consumers: Publishers that were charging for their PDFs before may decide to offer their PDFs for free or at reduced prices.

One example that comes to mind is the Vault Career Guide books that consumers can buy and download in PDF form. These could be offered at reduced prices while showing ads for job-sites such as Monster.com, etc.

One major drawback I see (although it doesn't get much play in the article): "Situations in which the ads will not be displayed include if the user is offline when opening the document ... "

1 comment:

Junghee said...

This is a pretty interesting development. Yahoo's trying to figure out where else it can use its sizable ads. I'm not really sure how much monetization it will get since a lot of pdf papers are already online.
I could see how people who might make templates - excel, ppt, word - can monetize their creations.