Adobe’s experiment with allowing publishers to place contextual ads directly inside PDF documents is coming to an end. The Adobe Labs project was launched just over a year ago in November, 2007.
The idea was that out of the billions of PDF documents produced every year, some of them get passed around enough to warrant advertising, especially those produced by traditional print publishers. Adobe teamed up with Yahoo to provide contextual text ads similar to what you would find next to that document if you were reading it online. Hey, inventory is inventory, right?
In a note to program participants, Adobe fobs off the failure of the PDF ads on the economy and its need to focus on its core products. But it was simply a bad idea. Trying to turn PDF files into an advertising vehicle was just never going to fly.
First, who wants to click on ads in a document? It is an unnatural act. Second, unlike a Website where advertisers at least have some sense of who the audience is, PDFs get passed around and downloaded willy-nilly. There is no good way to track who receives them, or who ultimately might click on those ads. Incidentally, this download problem also plagues ads in videos—advertisers are more comfortable paying for the ads watched in a stream than ads bundled with a download. Third, if the content in your PDF is so compelling that you think you can run ads against it, you are better off turning it into a Webpage.
And that’s my problem with PDFs, I guess. Adobe has done everything it can to protect the format instead of making it easy to publish PDFs as full Webpages.
This is the nail in the coffin.
PDFs aren’t for this world much longer.
Agree in the sense you are talking of.
But they’ll still be around in Academics for some time to come.
In print production, the PDF format has streamlined production by a massive order of magnitude. What used to be a mess of collecting fonts, assets and type was transformed into a complete non-issue by the PDF format. So, though some may wish for the demise of this format because it doesn’t fit their small view of exactly what the format is good for, I for one would hate to think of that possibility. I may add a seesmic response to this too.
No Seesmic necessary. Yes, PDFs did streamline Print publishing to the web 5 years ago, but now it’s all about XML, baby. PDFs won’t survive in a word contextual advertising, user discussions, RSS readers, eternally-crashing Adobe plugins, and landscape monitors.
Really, I just wanted to try a seesmic response.
I don’t know any presses that accept XML files for output. Though, granted, I haven’t asked around on that one, so maybe presses other than the one I use do. (I use one of the largest magazine printers in the country).
@Ryan – I agree!
@Randy – XML is content description, so you still need formatting rules, and an interpreter of those formatting rules, to display the content for a user.
I hate Adobe Reader, but Preview on the Mac and Foxit Reader on Windows actually make reading documents very comfortable. (They are also good for printing, which I never use, but the vast majority of people still value.)
Finally, one interesting development for me, as someone who works in health care IT, is that you can embed XML in PDF. In other words we can give the patient a copy of their medical records in PDF so that it is nicely printable and a snap-shot that can be stored by the patient. But I can also embed CCR XML inside that PDF so that software that can interpret the CCR XML can extract the content directly rather than having to parse PDF’s formatting data.
One InDesign file, two formats. XML for the WWW DBs, camera-ready PDFs from the printer.
Yes, it’s great for print. Agreed. But it needs to bridge from print to the Web to stay relevant.
Demise of PDF? No way! {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/lFIUaJXxE2_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Demise of PDF? No way! ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/q314Bk2bPB”}}}
I don’t think PDF’s will go away.
I use them extensively in place of a fax machine.
Simply scanning in a document, then sending it out via email is so much more efficient and safe than sending it through the old school fax.
I had a community newspaper and would love to replace the ads in the pdf to monetize the PDFs. Using remote fixed size images, like html, would be nice.
It’s not because olf the bad idea, it’s because the deal was made with Yahoo.
LOLz, AGAIN, at Yahoo.
Bunch of slapdicks over there.
“First, who wants to click on ads in a document? It is an unnatural act.”
Why not? Whats unnatural about it?
If for eg, the PDF document was a free chapter of a book about say, ‘blogging’ and there was a bunch of ads from amazon in that document, which provided links to buy tat book, and probably recommend more books on the topic, why wouldnt a reader of the pdf click ads? Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing to do?
“Second, unlike a Website where advertisers at least have some sense of who the audience is, PDFs get passed around and downloaded willy-nilly.”
I dont think i agree with the view that view as well. Lets assume you are passing a PDF that talks about “blogging” to your contacts on your email, you would be passing it around to ur blogger contacts, not to your girlfriend’s mom isnt it? Instead if you just blogged about the PDF, chances are people like ur girlfriend’s mom
would see that page as well. Now doesnt that mean that the PDF reaches more of the targetted audience, than generic audience?
To conclude, I’d say, a feature that was on Labs, as you say, is just that – an experimental feature. May be it wasn’t executed right – Probably the ads from yahoo weren’t narrowed enough. Just because some experiment is shut down doesn’t warrant a blog post saying it was a ‘bad idea’.
Thanks!
I totally agree. Only the third reason makes some sense.
The first reason tells nothing when referring to unnatural acts.
About the second reason, what’s the essential difference to advertisers using Google Ad Words? They also have absolutely no sense of who the audience is when they use Ad Words to spread their ads.
Agree with both points. The exeperiment was likely not executed very well. Plus it is natural for companies to pare down experiments during tough economy times to focus more on core offerings.
The targeting elements remain the same for PDFs, as with websites/ blogs.
What’s next, ads in Word Docs?
Haa ha! “What’s next, ads in Word Docs?” that would be downright disturbing!
@Erick – your reply isn’t exactly a response to my comment. You are digressing from the main discussion
>”What’s next, ads in Word Docs?”
For argument sake – Why not?
There has always been a section of webusers complaining about ads in webpages; when gmail started showing ads within email, there was a huge uproar. But aren’t we all used to these now?
And lastly, wasn’t there some news a while ago, about microsoft to come up with an ad supported free version of microsoft office or something?
I just googled it and found this post – http://arstechn...ware-pilot.html
Not such a bad idea … it could work
You can not have advertisers peeping in to your documents. The PDF should remain as they clean and acceptable. Any tinkering with the format will give a chance for XPS wallop in.
Maybe the more interesting question is “why” especially as it pertains to others contemplating document-based advertising models … there are an insanely large number of PDFs out there and one would think even with a low CTR, there would be ROI here … it may have actually performed at some level, but not material enough to be worth the distraction at Adobe’s enormous scale, or it may not have performed at all … which would be interesting to know
I create PDF’s all the time for various needs to help control people who try to steal my work as their own. Until there is another medium that is reasonable and easy to use that can protect my copyrights to some degree, I will continue to use PDF’s to distribute my work.
To head off discussions about how “un”secure PDF’s are, they are much like a lock on a door – they are basically there to keep honest people honest. I realize there are a plethora of programs out there to decode PDF’s into Word, text, HTML, etc but the security in PDF’s ability to to keep the average person from copy and pasting is a strong suit for me.
As for ads… I often use ads and affiliate links within my documents. I am not crazy about the idea of someone else being able to run ads right next to mine, ultimately losing me money on my works. Although this post does not focus on this, I would assume that this is at least some portion of the equation since MANY people still have their own ads in their PDF’s. If the ads were put there after the fact (not sure how it was working) then this could open the doors to civil suits against both Adobe and Yahoo.
Just my 2 cents worth
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Just think of the goldmine on confidential patient records, court filings, patent applications, and divorce procedures that Yahoo and Adobe were sitting on with their contextual ads!
Maybe they harvested enough private information to close down this venture and sell it at a profit?
Ads in PDF’s isn’t a bad idea in itself. Its how you do it. I think you got to the heart of the problem when you wrote: “Adobe has done everything it can to protect the format instead of making it easy to publish PDFs as full Webpages. ” This is the problem.
If PDF’s could be turned into complete webpages Adobe would have a winner on its hands. You could print the webpage out as if it were a PDF and click trough the PDF as if it were a webpage.
That would be cool and as they say on “Thomas The Train” very useful.
I’ve created an “RSS Newspaper” using the Feedjournal.com publisher. The RSS feeds have ads in them that you can see in PDF that is created
Check it out here: http://www.Libe...tynewsprint.com
I think this model would work is the PDF was the webpage.
The page takes a few minutes to load because I’ve created a large .PDF widget. If you don’t want to wait Click on “BackIssues” and you can see an example on Scribd.com
Libertynewsprint.com “America’s Digital Newspaper”
P.S.
See the Ad feed in on page 10 of today’s issue. (It doesn’t come in as a live link)
This was actually a great idea that was ahead of its time – somebody will bring it back when the time is right.
i agree
PDFs are here to stay. It’s one of the last place where you didn’t see ads… now it’s over
I recommend you all change from Adobe to Foxit PDF reader.
Alex
http://www.myriadsuite.com
http://www.xifactory.com
Adobe: World’s #1 Malware Vendor
Here is another way to look at it. Ads that are “part” of page are acceptable – magazines, newspapers do it all the time. What this suggests is if ads were placed artistically and are part of design process, this concept will have better chance of survival.
Page layouting technology is not there yet to automate such a process, in principal because its art. But it will get there.
That was a good idea that was badly executed. I don’t think it is unnatural for people to click related links for PDF docs.
After all, it’s what AdSense does, and advertisers go with matches that Google decides are good rather than choose what domains are good to show their ads.
The article has an unreasonable bias and I think if it worked, the author would make opposite statements.
PDFs aren’t going anywhere, in fact, as a private means of transmission of pre-formatted data, PDFs are still a great solution. For this use, ads are less effective, and many times inappropriate.
Ads on PDFs are more appropriate for public documents, linked from web pages, but the PDF is (rapidly) becoming outdated as a means of displaying these kinds of documents. Why are we still clicking to download content we want to read once and have no desire to own?
Web documents (such as those you can embed via Scribd, DocStoc or our product, Embedit.in) allow you to view a PDF in browser, no opening in Reader/Preview required. Essentially, your PDFs are the web page, much like LibertyNewsprint suggests.
The future of ads in PDFs are not ads displayed by Reader, but ads surrounding a web document player.
Exactly. Scribd, for example, has the iPaper product than alows embedding documents in a web page. Documents can be PDF, Word, or other formats. Basically, it abstracts the format and add features such as the possibility to comment, in order to leverage both the document and the web media.
I wrote a post on Scribd a few months ago: http://www.brun...p;tb=1&pb=1
This is just the other shoe dropping after the Adobe layoffs of last December. Adobe is trying to cut their internal costs to keep their numbers up where Wall Street wants them. Expect more products to find the end of their useful lives.
In related news, Microsoft announced that it would be putting ads in the “blue screen of death”, given that it is seen every day by millions across the world.
Of course, the #1 advertiser would be Apple.
“There is no good way to track who receives them”
Actually there is: DocMetrics
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