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Yahoo, Adobe To Serve Ads In PDFs

Posted by kdawson on Thu Nov 29, 2007 01:14 PM
from the something-else-to-block dept.
Businesses The Internet Yahoo!
Placid writes to alert us to a new channel opening up between advertisers and our eyeballs: PDFs with context-sensitive text ads. The service is called "Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo" and it goes into public beta today. The "ad-enabled" PDFs are served off of Adobe's servers. The article mentions viewing them in Acrobat or Reader but doesn't mention what happens when a non-Adobe PDF reader is used. The ads don't appear if the PDF is printed.
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Submission: Yahoo To Serve Adverts In PDFs by ilovegeorgebush (923173)
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  • Ad "Enabled" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:16PM (#21521151) Homepage Journal
    Funny use of the word "enabled".

    Yeah. Soon to be "Ad Disabled" once my proxy is updated.

  • Just what I need... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wait 5-10 seconds for my PDF reader to crank up just to display an ad.

    What genius came up with this stellar idea?

  • urgent need (Score:5, Funny)

    by FranTaylor (164577) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:17PM (#21521167)
    Why do I suddenly feel an urgent need to rush to the store to buy some Lightspeed Briefs?

    • Re:urgent need (Score:5, Funny)

      by saboola (655522) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:36PM (#21521445)
      Before you know it they are going to b ... Lightspeed briefs, style and comfort for the discriminating crotch. e interrupting my comment writing with ads.

  • Because the consumer asked for it. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheGeneration (228855) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:17PM (#21521175) Journal
    Obviously Yahoo and Adobe are doing this because the constumer asked to have ads served to them. Clearly they had customers calling them daily "Where are my ads? I want ADS!!!"

    I wish some of these tech companies would take a hint from craigslist. You can make money and have happy customers.
    • Are you saying tech companies should offer casual encounters with college girls and lonely housewives? Sounds like a plan to me, they win my vote!

    • Re:Because the consumer asked for it. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Abreu (173023) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:25PM (#21521277)
      Well, it depends on who do you consider their customers are... I think that Yahoo and Google provide a service to the public, but their true customers (the ones paying for the services) are the advertisers...

      So yeah, their customers clamored for more ads.

      • That doesn't apply to Adobe (Score:4, Insightful)

        by KWTm (808824) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:28PM (#21522353) Journal
        Your comment is insightful, but doesn't apply to Adobe's current situation.

        Yahoo and Google provide a service to the public, but their true customers (the ones paying for the services) are the advertisers...
        Indeed, many people fail to realize that, when it comes to services supported by advertising, the public is the product, not the customer. This explains why companies may sometimes piss off the public despite the adage that "the customer is king."

        However, Adobe has not been supported by ad revenue, at least not in a major way. They are now breaking into a new business model where they do have ad revenue, but that doesn't necessarily excuse any antagonization of the public just because "hey, now the public is the product, not the customer."

        • PDFs are a medium, web pages are a medium.

          Many academic conferences now charge for their articles, and as a poor grad student, I would rather deal with some ads than pay for a subscription. Sure, my school usually pays for me through their library, but I'll often come across journals that my school doesn't subscribe to. I'd happily deal with an ad to gain the convenience of accessing them online. At least, I'd like to have that option.

      • Re:Because the consumer asked for it. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Carnildo (712617) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:40PM (#21522529) Homepage Journal

        "God is dead" - Nietzsche, 1882

        "Nietzsche is dead" - God, 1900

        "Nietzsche is God" - The dead, 1918

      • Re:Because the consumer asked for it. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by vic-traill (1038742) on Thursday November 29 2007, @04:25PM (#21524031)

        "God is dead" - Nietzsche, 1882

        "Nietzsche is dead" - God, 1900

        "He's dead, Jim" - Dr. McCoy

    • Re:Because the consumer asked for it. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Orange Crush (934731) * on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:31PM (#21521369)
      Adobe gives Acrobat reader away for free. It charges money for its fancy publishing tools. So many of their paying customers are content creators that like getting paid . . . so yeah . . . I'll bet some of them actually asked for ads.

  • Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tritonman (998572) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:17PM (#21521181)
    So if PDF is supposed to be a publishing format, how can the view on the computer be different than the printed view? Why don't they just skip all this craziness and just ad-enable monitors.
    • Shhhhhh! Employees from HP and Dell might be reading!

    • Why don't they just skip all this craziness and just ad-enable monitors.
      Or glasses?

      Or eyeballs?

    • Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by secPM_MS (1081961) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:33PM (#21521403)
      PDF is now a programmable display platform, not a publishing format. Its programmability is significant enough that it is a potential security threat to users, who view it as data, not as a potential executable. The extension to advertising is obvious. How else will this functionality be used?

      This problem is no unique to pdf. The community swallowed the feature richness line and chose to ignore the old dictum, keep your data and your executables separate.

      How would you like your XML? Would you like javascript as well? How about AJAX?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tabdelgawad (590061)
      According to TFA, the ads will be in a separate panel in the reader, so we'll have our identical display and printed views.

      This is an option _publishers_ of content will have. I think it's a great idea, actually. I'm quite happy looking at a few ads to get the content of Slashdot, the NYT, Washington Post, Gmail, Google search, practically the whole subscription-free part of the internet. If this model allows some publishers to put out stuff for free that they previously charged for, I think that's great
    • Why don't they just skip all this craziness and just ad-enable monitors.

      Damn you to hell sir!

      I'm sure there's someone out there just waiting for this kind of ironic statement so they can claim it is a requested feature.

      Hmmmm.... Perhaps I should just shut up and patent the idea.
  • Displaying ads in the excel file that you sent via yahoo mail?
  • I run a computer lab on a large university, and we already have more problems getting PDFs to print than any other format...so now they're going to muck up the spec even more?! Thanks soooooooooooooooooo much guys.

    • Re:Ya frickin hoo. (Score:5, Informative)

      by smooth wombat (796938) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:30PM (#21521351) Homepage Journal
      more problems getting PDFs to print than any other format.


      Explain how this is possible when the purpose of a pdf is to keep the original formatting of the document and be able to be printed and still retain that formatting. The ONLY problem I have ever encountered with pdf files is on a Lexmark printer where I had to set it to print pdfs as an image file. Other than that, no problems whatsoever.

      For the record, my last job involved maintaining over 800 printers across the entire state with Lexmark and HP being the most common but also Xerox copiers/printers and Imagistic (ewwwww) multi-function machines thrown in.

      My current job has 1/3 the number of printers yet we still encounter zero problems with pdf files.

      If you have problems getting pdfs to print, there is something seriously wrong.

    • Really? Seriuosly? I've never had a problem printing a PDF in my life. I often use PDF when transporting documents from one place to another for printing, because things like changing the version of the word processor, or even just using a different printer with some word processors can have drastic results on how the document prints. When I went to get my self-designed wedding invitations printed, I brought the file on CD in about 4 different formats, and asked which ones they recommended I print from.

  • Uninstall Adobe's product and... (Score:4, Informative)

    by CFBMoo1 (157453) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:22PM (#21521245) Homepage
    install Foxit if they start pumping out Ads to PDF files.

    http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php [foxitsoftware.com]
    • Spot on.

      I already use Foxit. It installs in the time it takes Adobe to load. If the ads are coming from Adobe's servers, then in theory the ads are in the reader. So get a different reader.

      Adobe gives PDF a bad name, and that's saying something. Adobe, what do we hate about thee?

      The invasive updater software. The amount of crap it puts on your Add/Remove Programs list in Windows (like every update). The other programs it nags you about installing whenever you update it (which is *way* too often if you
    • I'm a big fan of the Foxit Reader - it's much less bulky and intrusive than the Adobe reader.

      My only gripe is their lack of a plugin for Firefox. Many of the PDFs that I encounter are online, and it's more convenient (for me, at least) to view them inside of the browser instead of launching the program externally.

      Of course, given recent events [slashdot.org], no plugins may be a good thing...

  • Charming (Score:3, Insightful)

    by overshoot (39700) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:25PM (#21521281)
    ... one more rule for the firewall, anyone?

  • now with more annoyance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wizardforce (1005805) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:25PM (#21521291) Journal
    dynamic ads require a source of data to work and that means they can probably be disabled by blacklisting the source servers, either that or they will actually start embedding ads into the PDFs themselves as "static content" that nothing short of aditing the PDF manually will solve.

  • Yahoo vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jhfry (829244) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:32PM (#21521389)
    Google realizes that it cannot make money through advertising indefinately... so what does it do, it researches new ides to an extreme previously unheard of. Their ads are lightwight and unobtrusive. Essentially they are ad funded, but overall they are good to their users/customers.

    Yahoo, who doesn't seem to get it, simply finds ways to put ads where they haven't been before. Great for the ad revenue, bad for their users.

    Is there really anyone who hasn't figured out why Google is such a majority favorite? If not for google, I suspect that flash based ads would still be the standard, and everyone would be experiementing with streaming video ads or some crap like that. Thank god google came along and showed their competition that the business model doesn't require large, annoying ads, but instead a huge volume of well placed ads that appeal instead of repel the user!

    If yahoo wan't ad's in PDF's, so be it... all the more reason for me to stick with google.
    • ...except that Google has been serving Flash advertisements for quite a while now, and image advertisements for even longer.

  • acroread gives the hint (javascript) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheGratefulNet (143330) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:37PM (#21521465)
    first time I saw jscript in acroread, I barfed.

    it was also the last time I ran and installed acroread, too.

    you listening adobe?

    xpdf does the job just fine for me, now. are you happy, adobe? (I am!)

    what is this going to do to corp america that often does NOT want anyone outside the company knowing that person A opened doc B? much less having outbound and inbound packets eat up your corp network b/w.

    bright idea (not!).

    then again, people DO seem to be running acroread (win or other version) and so maybe they just don't CARE that scripting and 'active things' happen just because they opened a doc.

  • Or better yet, how bout I use Open Office and get ad-free documents?
    Somehow I don't see a professional document being very professional if adverts are included.

    'So you see the fiscal outlook for this quarter were much larger than previous quarters this can be -what the?! Oh uhh, sorry folks, you'll have to bear with me. I clicked 'larger' and I'm being re-directed to a penis enlargement website. If everybody would please avert their eyes from the screen and maybe look at the non ad-laced budget forecast pri

  • Preview (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jerry Rivers (881171) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:38PM (#21521493)
    I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't work in Preview in OS X. At least for a while 'til Apple can get revenue from it. Preview, for those not familiar with it, basically renders Adobe Reader pointless on a Mac, especially because it is about ten times faster than Reader. So for stuff that doesn't require Acrobat Pro, Preview rules.

    • I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't work in Preview in OS X. At least for a while 'til Apple can get revenue from it. Preview, for those not familiar with it, basically renders Adobe Reader pointless on a Mac, especially because it is about ten times faster than Reader. So for stuff that doesn't require Acrobat Pro, Preview rules.

      Indeed, and the lack of the flashing ads that the Adobe reader has stupidly added to the reader is another huge boost for Preview and another hint that this insane scheme won't affect the Mac community.

  • Shooting the Moon! (Score:3, Funny)

    by eli pabst (948845) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:41PM (#21521547)
    Awesome! I was wondering how Adobe was going to make Acrobat Reader even more of a bloated monstrosity than it already is. What a better way to expand its memory footprint than to integrate some kind of ad management function. I hope they use Flash ads for this. I can smell the sweet aroma of burning RAM already!

  • Great. Now PDFs will be even slower and crappier (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GnarlyDoug (1109205) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:44PM (#21521589)
    I hate PDFs. Every time I wind up having to open one of these things in a browser it just sucks. They load up slow. If they're large then I often times cannot even page forward. They're very laggy, and sometimes just plain lock up. The frustration with trying to read a PDF is already huge for me. I see this behavior on Windows and Mac boxes, and with various browsers as well, and it's not like I'm using ancient machines. Maybe other people have had different experiences? What am I missing here? PDF just seems broken to me already.

    Anyway, now they want to add ads to these things? I really don't know what to say. I already consider PDFs to be on the verge of being totally unusable. This should push them right over the edge.

    • I used to feel that way. Then I started using Foxit PDF reader.

      The problem isn't with PDF in itself. PDF is perceived as a problem for two reasons:

      1) Adobe Acrobat. Get rid of it, for goodness sake. Use something else. PDF isn't slow, Adobe's crappy reader is slow.
      2) Web developers cannot resist putting TPPs on websites. What's a TPP, you ask? A Totally Pointless PDF. People: if you have a website, there's one way to get me to NEVER read your content. How? By putting it in PDF. The ONE exception is this: if you have a book or reference manual, then that is an appropriate use of PDF. But tell me that I am downloading a PDF. Don't disguise your PDF as another web page by just putting it behind a normal link. When I click a link, unless I am warned that it's a PDF, I expect an HTML page. PDF just interrupts the flow of the web. Don't believe me? The just google usability and PDF. You'll get lots of stuff like this: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html [useit.com].

      PDF is like other overused "web" technologies like flash: useful when used properly, and annoying as hell when overused.

  • Open standards. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Assassin bug (835070) on Thursday November 29 2007, @01:52PM (#21521741) Journal
    Keep up the fight for open standards and this becomes less of a problem.
  • The sooner people figure out that PDF is a bloated and shitty format, the better.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dracos (107777)

      The format isn't bloated and shitty (it's a subset of PostScript), it's Adobe's reader that's bloated and shitty, and they want to make it as shitty as possible. There are alternatives out there, like FoxIt [foxitsoftware.com].

      PDF as a format isn't going anywhere, since it's becoming the de facto standard format in the print industry.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Grishnakh (216268)
          Most people aren't fond of PDF because Adobe's Reader is so bloated and slow. This has zero to do with PDF the format, and everything to do with Adobe's software. I don't mind PDFs at all because they load extremely quickly on my system.

          As for overuse, it depends on how you intend to use the information. If it's meant to be viewed on the web only, then PDF really isn't the best format: what looks good on a printed page doesn't necessarily look good on a monitor. A wiki format is definitely better for ma
    • The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

      --Samuel Johnston

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jacquesm (154384)
        The Future Of Advertising

        While walking down the street 'security' cameras will perform face recognition on everybody walking by. The 'search space' problem will be solved by tracking you all day long, so it is a relatively small problem compared to recognizing a random face. Installed during the terrorism craze in the beginning of the century they now serve a different master. Once tracked you stay tracked. Then the advertising kicks in, small, weak laser based units will beam targeted advertising straight

    • How long until the first page of TI's latest chip spec gets inserted with an ad while downloading?

      If they're gonna imbed advertising in the Virtual Machine [like the PDF* reader, or, God forbid, the Java/CLR/VMware VM's], then how long before some wiseass says, "Hey, let's embed the advertising stream in the silicon?"



      [*I read somewhere that - while PostScript is Turing-complete - PDF is not Turing-complete.]
      • This reminds me of the Bill Hick's bit on advertisers.. do a search in youtube and you'll find it. They really are turning into Satan's Little Helpers.

        Seriously, do we really need more ads on EVERYTHING?? I understand the need to get a product's info out into the brain's of all americans, but there is something to be said of plastering them everywhere that has the space.

        At least there's always a way to block electronic ads. The meatspace ads are the ones that really tick me off.

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