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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.
Funny use of the word "enabled".
Yeah. Soon to be "Ad Disabled" once my proxy is updated.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Wait 5-10 seconds for my PDF reader to crank up just to display an ad.
What genius came up with this stellar idea?
Why do I suddenly feel an urgent need to rush to the store to buy some Lightspeed Briefs?
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.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
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.
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.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
install Foxit if they start pumping out Ads to PDF files.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
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
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... one more rule for the firewall, anyone?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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 printout provided while I try to close these pop ups'
I have nothing compelling to say
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.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
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!
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.
Keep up the fight for open standards and this becomes less of a problem.
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.
PDF is like other overused "web" technologies like flash: useful when used properly, and annoying as hell when overused.
blah blah blah
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."
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I think it is a pretty decent idea. From the context it is talking about only PDFs created with a certain version of the software rather than regular adobe pro, which means you wouldn't use it for creating professional office documents, but distributable publications. It also makes some mention of the publisher being able to profit from it, this would be a cool way for someone to make a career of writing and distributing content without charging for it or hosting it on a server. They just wrap the content up as PDF with the ads and then it can travel through email or be posted anywhere and can be profitable through the proliferation of its usage.
With the rising cost of published books and the diminishment of the publishing industry due to internet usage, this may be a new way to profit from writing without having to make people pay for it.
Now rip me a new one for being a corporate shrew.
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.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
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.
PDF as a format isn't going anywhere, since it's becoming the de facto standard format in the print industry.
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 many things, as wikipedia has shown. But if it's meant to be shown on a printed page (usually 8.5" x 11" or A4), PDF is one of the best formats available. I frequently view technical data sheets, catalog pages, and the like online in PDF format; it works for those because they're meant to be printed out if desired.
Also, if the document was originally made as a printed document, and the company wants to make it available online, the easiest way to do this is to optically scan it directly into PDF format. This is great for old manuals or other historical texts.
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 onto your retina while you're walking by. On your way to the mall to buy a pair of jeans ? Maybe in the need of a new vehicle (after all, you're walking). Targeted ads never were named more aptly, and you're being sold to the highest bidder, one of the stores that you are going to pass anyway will surely hit you, another 'kill' for the admasters.
PDF's had a pretty good automatic 'informative' rating in my book to this date, I'll have to review that and degrade it. IMNSHO this is the most stupid thing adobe could have done. I'm sure they'll make some $ on the decision but it sure seems like a short sighted move to me.
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