Adobe offers ads in its PDF reader via Yahoo Ad Network

[mattymcg]

What do you guys think about this?

Adobe and Yahoo test running ads inside PDF documents

As a site owner, would you consider advertising your own site or services via this distribution method? As a consumer, if it resulted in more PDFs becoming available for free, would seeing ads in your reader while you read them make that worthwhile? Or would you just move to a different reader?

[Darren884]

Sure I would consider it, why not?

[joebert]

Yahoo is notorious for digging themselves in deep. I look at a PDF with Yahoo ads in it, next thing I know I'm going to have a toolbar I can't get rid of.

No thanks, I'm not touching them.

[brent5392]

As a developer, i'm not sure I'd been keen on putting ads in my PDF documents either. Yes, I may be able to make a bit of money from it, but what about all the money I may lose from people being unhappy with ads in my document and leaving my site all together? These factors need consideration.

As a PDF reader, I would be unhappy to see ads in documents I have downloaded from websites. My computer is old, and slow. PDF documents take long enough to load as it is. I don't want it to take longer due to it grabbing ads that I don't want to see anyway. I'm aware the extra load time would be minimal, I'm just emphasising my point.

I can put up with ads on websites,they don't bother me all that much at all. But ads in documents seems a little too far. Yes, they are only text based, but you know where it will go from there. Introducing advertising into the programs we use is not a good future. Next it will be ads popping up when we move over keywords of the document.

This would also allow for greedy developers to offer two versions of documents. One freely available document with ads. One document without ads, available at a small cost.

[jylyn]

No, I wouldn't advertise. At least not until it became fairly mainstream, and probably not even then. People will be surprised and confused to see ads in a PDF and I wouldn't want them associating those negative feelings with my sites.

[samanime]

It depends how they implement them. If they are implemented tastefully and non-intrusively, then definitely. I wouldn't have a problem as a reader with them either.

However, if they are annoying, in the way, too large, lag-causing, etc. I would neither use them or want to see them.

[onaweb]

As a site owner, I would not be happy with this. It says the ads will be based on content of the pdf. So as a web designer, I put up a step by step guide on websites for my clients, a client comes to my website, downloads the document, opens it up and is staring at an ad for a competitor of mine - not good!!

[godlover]

i use pdf very rarely

[john2k]

I think this is actually great. Remember, this isn't something that Adobe & Yahoo are forcing down on us. It is an option available to the publisher of the PDF.

Publishers do not need to do anything if they want to keep their PDFs ad-free. If ads are wanted in specific PDFs, publishers will need to register for that and submit each PDF so that they can have ads integrated.

Here's another article from MediaPost with a bit more detailed information.

I'm all for it as long as it remains an option for publishers and not mandatory.

I can understand some not wanting to see advertisements in PDFs, but it really isn't all that much different than ads being displayed on websites and for the same reason.

[jainmanoj123]

I too shall consider it as I am very much used to PDF...

[Simon Mackie]

As a site owner, I would not be happy with this. It says the ads will be based on content of the pdf. So as a web designer, I put up a step by step guide on websites for my clients, a client comes to my website, downloads the document, opens it up and is staring at an ad for a competitor of mine - not good!!

In Adsense you can block ads from your competitors - I'm assuming they'll have something similar here.

I'm not seeing the problem - it's like Adsense or YPN, but in PDFs. If you want to monetize PDFs by selling ad space, it's a way of doing it without having to sell ads yourself. The ads will only appear if you sign up. No-one is forcing them on you. I'm surprised the haven't done this already, actually.

[marcel]

I would like to hear some advertising reviews. If anyone tries it, let us know.

[CPALead_Charles]

I guess that once it becomes mainstream, a lot of the people that said "no" at the beginning would at least try it.

Plus they do say that the ads would match the content, so they would be relevant to the reader, so I really don't see the problem of putting a few ads on a PDF that is a paid file right now, some e-book writers might start offering a free version of their books, ad supported.

[Edman]

This already happens in lots of ebooks, except that authors now use affiliate links.