According to the two companies, the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo service, currently in its beta version, would offer a new channel for advertisers, while readers will benefit from free documents that were previously charged. The dynamically generated ads will be delivered from Yahoo’s inventory of ads.
Kurt Garbe, vice president of platform at Adobe said that the inclusion of pay-per-click text ads on PDF files will give publishers another revenue-generating option for the content they have in this popular Adobe document format. He also said, as the practice of charging for content continues to decrease industry-wide, publishers need to monetize their free content with advertising, which has been a challenge for PDF files.
However, Mr Garbe declined to comment on whether the program will later be open to other ad providers like Google.
Adobe and Yahoo said that they plan to simplify the process in the future by enabling automated uploading of PDF files to their portal, and Adobe might enable in-built functions in the PDF software that would enable publishers to generate documents with the advertising capabilities.
Josh Jacobs, vice president of publisher solutions at Yahoo said that although the program is now limited to text, pay-per-click ads, it might be expanded to include other formats such as graphical and rich media.
Adobe said that the service is currently free and does not require any additional software. It is available to only US publishers with websites in English and offers control over the ads appearing on the documents.
According to IDG News Service, Yahoo’s access to PDF documents for its ads inventory could improve its pay-per-click ad business, which lags behind Google’s.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
