Adobe Teams Up With Yahoo to Run Ads in PDF Files

By VAUHINI VARA
November 29, 2007; Page B3

The text-based advertisements that you are used to seeing on Web sites are coming soon to an unusual place: PDF documents.

Adobe Systems Inc., a maker of online-publishing software, announced Thursday a program in which publishers can get paid to run ads from Yahoo Inc.'s ad service alongside PDFs.

Adobe, San Jose, Calif., gives away the Reader software used for accessing documents in its "Portable Document Format" and makes money by selling the Acrobat software used for creating such documents. Until now, publishers could place ads in PDFs on their own, charging advertisers for static blocks of text or graphics that they would place in the document. But that meant the publishers had to sell the ads and lay them out on the page on their own.

Now, publishers will be able to show ads alongside their PDFs without selling and inserting the ads themselves, by uploading the PDF content to Adobe's Web site to ad-enable it, then distributing the PDFs as they previously did -- an easier and less costly option. Advertisers, meanwhile, can use Yahoo's existing self-service ad system to buy text ads that will run in a panel to the right of the PDF, when it is viewed in Acrobat or Reader. Yahoo will use the text of the PDF to place contextual ads that are relevant to the subject matter of the PDF -- similar to the text ads that run in blogs, for instance. For example, the editor of a newsletter for car enthusiasts could send out the newsletter at no charge and make money through the ad system, which might display ads for car accessories.

The revenue from the ad will be shared between the publisher, Adobe and Yahoo. The companies declined to give details on the revenue split.

"Consumers' expectation is that content is free," says Kurt Garbe, an entrepreneur in residence in advertising at Adobe. "Some content will be sold at premium pricing, but there's a whole bunch of content" that can be monetized through ads.

Publishers participating in the program, called Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo, include Meredith Corp., Reed Elsevier PLC and Pearson PLC's Pearson Education, among others.

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