Some of you will remember the first time that you created a PDF with a free piece of software, embarrassingly at the bottom of the PDF it said something like ‘this PDF was created with the XYZ PDF creator’,’ and you immediately paid your $50 or whatever it was to buy the utility for creating PDFs which did not carry an advert for the software author.
When we heard this week that Adobe and Yahoo were partnering to bring advertising to the humble PDF, the first reaction was to wince and recall that embarrassment, but actually, on reflection this is something else entirely.
It actually does create a whole new business model. Magazines made their journey onto the internet in a number of ways initially, but back in the early 90s when that was first going on, it soon resolved into mass carriage for the banner advert, measured on views or click through. With the creation of the PDF format, we had a more austere, professional creation which allowed papers, and research and even legal documents to be sent over the internet, without a great deal of bandwidth being required, which could be consumed offline, for instance while traveling. It was an advertising free world, but it usually involved content that was paid for, or where the financial payload was somewhere else (such as a legal document being finally paid for in legal fees etc’)
But increasingly no internet experience is an advertising free world. By dynamically placing advertising in the top corner of a PDF as you read it, with the advertising being selected to some extent by searching the text of the content, the PDF can be treated like a web page, and those web ‘controlled circulation’ magazine revenues streams can be extended to the PDF. Like in-game adverts, and applications that have a ‘promotional’ version, we imagine that there will always be a resident advert available, even when offline. Similarly we expect that like Google Adsense, the publishers which take up the offer will share revenue with Adobe and Yahoo.
The system is called Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo!, which is a long name for a simple service. In the end marginal, low priced publishing services could become profitable using the service. Publishers simply create their document and then upload it to an Adobe web site to have it advertising enabled, and then they send it out. We imagine ad enablement is little more than embedding a link to the document’s index.
Ads for the service are available now in beta and already major publishers make up the bulk of those trying it out including IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier.
Ads can only be displayed within Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, in a panel next to the content so that it does not disrupt the viewing experience. Every time the PDF content is viewed, contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document. The publisher can then monitor performance through detailed reports.