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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..."
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.
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..."
Yahoo are great at this sort of thing, annoying the hell out of net users. It's why I stopped using their services.
Adverts sure don't work for me. If there's something I want I will check for reviews and opinion, a brand and flashy adverts don't persuade me to part with my cash.
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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."
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
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.
PDF is like other overused "web" technologies like flash: useful when used properly, and annoying as hell when overused.
blah blah blah
Or though the quick and easy way of not using Adobe. /me points over to Foxit or any of the other free readers.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
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]