Adobe and Yahoo! team up to create PDF ads

29th November 2007

Adobe is to launch a new programme allowing Yahoo! to deliver contextually relevant ads on PDF files.

Publishers will upload their PDF documents to a Yahoo!-Adobe portal which will then insert pay-per-click adverts to the files, giving them a new source of revenue, reports Kurt Garbe, entrepreneur in residence for advertising at Adobe.

He explained that free online content requires subsidising by advertising as the practice of charging for content is diminishing.

"PDFs are a widely used document format, so this is a big untapped area for advertising," said Matt Swain, a senior analyst at InfoTrends.

Publishers using the programme will be allowed to ban adverts from up to 200 URLs, giving them a certain degree of control over what appears next to their files.

Online advertising revenue in the US rose by 25 per cent during the third quarter of 2007, reports the Internet Advertising Bureau reaching returns of $5.2 billion (£2.5 billion).