Yahoo, Adobe To Serve Ads In PDFs

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.

Just what I need...

[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?

Ya frickin hoo.

[Radical Moderate]

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.

Preview

[Jerry Rivers]

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.

Open standards.

[Assassin bug]

Keep up the fight for open standards and this becomes less of a problem.

May be a mixed blessing

[triffidsting]

I know this is /., so yeah, we all hate ads... There is a possible upside though.

I'm a grad student, I do a lot of research for my classes online, and 90% of the papers I read are in PDF format. For the benefit being able to download these papers, I pay an annual fee for membership in IEEE & ACM to access their digital libraries. If they (ACM/IEEE) could recover their fees through showing ads in the pdfs, maybe I could forgo paying their membership fees and opt instead to download the ad-laden version.

Then again, who knows, they might try to have their cake and eat it too - by charging me a membership fee to access ad-laden pdf versions.

Re:That doesn't apply to Adobe

[AnonymousCactus]

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.