Adobe seeks Ads for Adobe PDF beta participants

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Publishers of all sizes — from large corporations to individual hobbyists — were early to recognize the many virtues of the Portable Document Format (PDF) that made it a great way to distribute documents online, from annual reports to digital magazines to specialized newsletters.

With the announcement today of the beta of a new service to help generate revenue from valuable content, Adobe Systems is aiming to further enhance the benefits of PDF for the publishing market. Ads for Adobe PDF, launched in partnership with the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN), will make it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant ads to PDF-based content--by automatically matching advertisers with topical content, and by providing a means to track performance of the ads. Adobe is accepting applications to be part of a private beta program prior to the eventual commercial launch of the service.

Adobe is providing this as an optional service for publishers who make the choice to monetize their content with ads. The publishers will make this choice, based on their understanding of their reader bases and the type of content they are creating.

It's similar to what an ad network offers publishers of Web-based content, according to Cynthia Tillo of Adobe, senior product manager for the project, extending the monetization opportunity to PDF. She explains how the ads will appear in the PDFs:

"When someone opens up an ad-enabled PDF [sample]," Tillo says, "they would see a new ad panel on the right-hand side that contains up to five text-based ad links, which are relevant to the content. When someone sees an offer or something of interest to them, they would click through on that ad, opening a separate Web browser and linking directly to that advertiser's offering. That's when the publisher generates revenue—from the ad clicks."

The service is free, with no registration fee and no additional software to buy or download, she says. It supports files created from PDF version 1.1 and above. Viewing of ads requires the free Adobe Reader 8.1 or above; users attempting to open an ad-enabled PDF with an older version of Reader will be prompted to upgrade.

“All that's required to ad-enable your PDF is to upload it,” says Tillo. “We associate that document with you so we know whom to pay, and then our analysis engine kicks in. It automatically analyzes that content so we know what relevant types of ads should be served next to your PDF.”

“Once that analysis is completed, you'll receive via e-mail a registered version of your PDF—meaning there's some additional metadata that we put in so we know what to do with the PDF. You would just distribute that PDF like you normally would—e-mail or post for download. When someone opens the PDF, that's when we dynamically match up the ads from Yahoo!," she says.

Adobe is looking to involve publishers of different sizes and with varying content to its beta program. Interested publishers can review the FAQ, Flash demo and samples of ad-enabled PDFs on the Adobe Labs site, then complete an online application form that asks about their PDF-publishing profile. Certain types of content probably lend themselves better to benefiting from the service than others, Tillo says.

"In terms of the ideal type of content for which this would be most suitable—heartier content, lengthier than the typical blog post, makes the most sense,” she says. “In terms of lifetime of the content, a current news article with a short shelf life probably doesn't make sense. Product reviews, tips and tricks, organizational newsletters and so on that attract ongoing readership makes more sense. This is an ideal opportunity if you publish frequently and distribute to a large reader base."

The service is designed to be easy to use, Tillo says, with minimal impact on existing PDF-publishing workflows. Publishers can either supplement existing revenue models such as subscriptions or sponsorships—or add a revenue stream to freely available content. Using the Yahoo! network to automatically match and serve relevant ads from a large pool of advertisers, the service simplifies what can be a resource-consuming process for publishers and provides important audience metrics.

Probably of equal importance to an advertiser, even if they're advertising in PDF-based publications today, they have limited information about the reader base and little visibility into the effectiveness of their ads. "There's really no easy way for advertisers to measure how many people opened that PDF and actually viewed an ad, or how many actually took action because of that ad," says Tillo.

One of the already approved beta participants—Dimitri Munkirs of WindJack Solutions—is optimistic about the benefits of ad-enabled PDF publishing for such things as white papers.

"I'm looking forward to the beta and think the new ad model for PDFs is something whose time has come," she says. "People want 'at-your-fingertips' information—relevant information to their searches. As long as the ad-serving service provides additional information with a high degree of relevance, I think this model will be successful."

She also anticipates skepticism from some who may feel "PDF is in a way sacrosanct as far as ads go," she says. "But again, in this hyper-speed information age, there is a reason Google, Yahoo! and so on are successful with their sponsored-ad-campaign models in the browser. PDFs with additional interactivity and links to additional relevant information will likely experience the same level of success."

Bob Connolly of pdfPictures.com, another beta participant, concurs on the potential of the new service. Among its varied publishing efforts, the company currently produces a travel website that generates advertising revenue from Google ads and offers downloadable travel eBooks in PDF that can also include advertising.

pdfPictures is planning to adapt its Virtual Canada Ebook, created in 2003, for its beta publishing project.

"It's difficult to generate money at this point from PDF eBooks and magazines," says Connolly, author of the "Dynamic Media: Music, Video, Animation, and the Web in Adobe PDF" book and CD-ROM. "Now that a PDF file can contain advertising from Yahoo!, there is a new business model developing free PDF magazines, books or even white papers, knowing there is a possibility of revenue from keyword advertising. And PDF files are viral—they are copied and forwarded to others via e-mail—so there is additional revenue each time it is passed on."

Even with their PDFs being shared widely, publishers maintain control over the content, and can turn off the ads at any point, Tillo says.

"If for whatever reason you decide not to include ads in your PDF anymore, you can cancel that registration centrally," she says. “Even if it's been downloaded to someone's desktop and you have no idea where it's been circulated, you'll still have control to decide whether or not you want ads to show up. That's an especially interesting feature for someone who's trying to figure out the right type of content to monetize. This is a very safe environment in which to do that."

For those who may anticipate a sudden barrage of ads appearing in PDF files they download, Tillo emphasizes that "this is a publisher-choice opportunity. You're not going to suddenly start seeing ads in all PDFs."

But for those who publish valuable content, it makes sense to try to profit a little (or a lot) from it. With the launch of the Ads for Adobe PDF service, that possibility becomes a lot easier.