Adobe has partnered with Yahoo! for an interesting advertising idea — running ads alongside PDF documents in the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader. Officially called Ads for Adobe PDF, it allows PDF publishers to monetize their content without having to find advertisers themselves. That’s because Yahoo! provides them as part of their ad serving system.
Much like a typical search results page, ads are run along the right-hand side of Adobe Acrobat Reader. A publisher simply uploads a PDF document to Yahoo!’s ad serving system. The PDF gets analyzed to determine the most relevant ads (similar to contextual advertising). A set of marketers’ ads are served up to readers of the PDF. It also claims to allow you to block competitors’ ads from showing up in your PDF. Lastly, publishers get the full performance tracking and reporting capabilities of regular Yahoo! search advertisers.
