Yahoo! to Embed Ads in PDF Files

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe's Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format.

The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast.

The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed.

The scheme is optional, but unfortunately only for the advertiser. Advertisers just upload their PDF files to Yahoo! so they can be “ad-enabled”, meaning the adverts linked to the document’s contents are slotted in.

The Advs are shown in a side panel that appears in Acrobat Reader whenever the document’s opened, though Yahoo! hasn’t said if this panel can be hidden by users. We suspect not. It’s expected that the ads will be charged on a pay-per-click basis.

Unfortunately, it’s questionable how much the advertising will add to the ‘user experience’. Unless you actually want your monthly departmental financial analysis review PDF content linked to adverts for 30 per cent off stationery and offers to slash the cost of your medical bills.