Are there any corners of the Web that won’t end up plastered in advertising?
Today comes news of a plan by Adobe and Yahoo! to attach ads to PDF documents displayed inside a browser. Given the A4 size, PDFs leave space for a column of adverts to be attached in the right hand margin of the screen: they will be supplied dynamically by Yahoo, using its standard keyword bidding system and contextualisation engine.
This potentially opens up a big new advertising market – Adobe says that some 90 per cent of internet-connected PCs have one of its PDF readers, and the format is widely used by both professional publishers as well as amateurs who want to create their own professional-looking newsletters and other documents.
PDF documents also have characteristics that should make them particularly valuable advertising vehicles, says Emily Reilly, an analyst at Jupiter Research. They tend to contain specialist information and reside several "levels" down in most Web sites: that means that internet users who take the trouble to find and open them are likely to be very interested in the subject, and so more valuable to advertisers. Also, PDFs tend to have a very long shelf-life, so a library of documents, once created, might generate a continuing stream of revenue, with new adverts placed against it by Yahoo.
The idea raises some intriguing possibilities. What about placing advertising alongside other PDF documents, such as those generated by companies who use it as a format for creating regular corporate documents? Adobe and Yahoo executives say this is not part of the initial plan, which is aimed at online publishers, but do not rule it out for later.
Also, how about using Adobe’s Flash player as another vehicle to distribute advertising? Like the Acrobat document reader, Flash is on most PCs. That could give Adobe an influential role in online video as well as text and graphical advertising.
Internet users, meanwhile, will just have to get used to seeing more commercial messages in more places – though Adobe and Yahoo executives take refuge behind the familiar claim that this advertising will at least be relevant and unobtrusive.
(Disclosure: one of the publishers taking part in a trial of the PDF advertising system is the education division of Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times.)
