Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

[0iD]

Well I never, whatever next....

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format. The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast.

BBC NEWS | Business | Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files

[Saracen]

Oh, great. Now not only are companies going to be supplying their manuals in PDF rather than printed, but they'll be shoving adverts in too. How long before some PDF ad-blocker appears, I wonder?

[Sepulchre]

seems you can open anything on the web anymore without being hit in the face by adverts, I thought at least pdf's were safe

[ScottY_]

Yay another way for spyware to try to get onto my PC...

Soon your start bar will have pop-ups...

[this_is_gav]

I don't mind software which includes optional ad support, but I refuse to install anything that includes it as standard. This isn't just taking it to the next level, it's jumping up to a whole new era. Ads in documents is just taking it too far.

What's going to happen if your ISP blocks Yahoo?

I hope Foxit have the same view of this that I do, and simply ignores the adverts in it's software.

A very sad day for IT.

[Lucio]

I don't see why advertisers feel they have to cram their message down our throats, after all they must realise that people respond negatively the more invasive the adverts become.

I realise that the internet isn't a free resource, things like Hexus cost money to run and adverts are seen as an easy way to generate revenue. Personally though, I prefer a subscription model, I'm surprised no one has come up with a scheme similar to that used on many adult sites, pay a subscription to join a package of websites and then the individual websites get a revenue based on how many people visit their individual site.

[chrestomanci]

If you are downloading the PDF for keeps, then you can use pdftk to edit the pdf in order to remove pages, (and loads of other things). If the adverts are in the form of extra pages in the PDF, then you can use it to remove those advert pages.

AccessPDF - Pdftk

[badass]

I don't see why advertisers feel they have to cram their message down our throats, after all they must realise that people respond negatively the more invasive the adverts become.

Thats where you're wrong. The more you ram something down the average persons throat through advertising, the more likely they are to buy it.

[this_is_gav]

If you are downloading the PDF for keeps, then you can use to edit the pdf in order to remove pages, (and loads of other things). If the adverts are in the form of extra pages in the PDF, then you can use it to remove those advert pages.

Not necessarily. It's only a click or 2 in Acrobat to secure a PDF from editing and printing. How secure it is I've no idea, but it's there.

[TiG]

It would potentially kill the PDF as a option, people might start to look at alternatives if the reaction from the consumer is negative.

TiG

[Saracen]

Thats where you're wrong. The more you ram something down the average persons throat through advertising, the more likely they are to buy it.

Unfortunately, that's dead right.

Aggressive advertising has a very negative effect on some people, and I go considerably out of my way to avoid it all, but the fact remains that that is a price advertisers are prepared to pay, because the numbers show that, on average, it simply works. Unfortunately.

[rox0r]

For personal use I would probably tolerate it. For corporate use, forget it that's not going to fly. A lot of companies use pdf for sensitive material and aren't going to tolerate adverts and such. Presumably they'll do a license version with the ads removed.

[Saracen]

I might be reading it wrong, rox0r, but i get the impression that the idea is to allow document publishers to embed adverts. So when you buy something (camera, for instance) and you only get the full manual on CD, the camera maker can embed dynamic adverts in the manual, which you'll see when you try to read it. But unless I'm very much off-base, it's down to the document publisher to embed adverts, so corporates producing sensitive documents just choose not to do so.

I don't imagine Adobe would be stupid enough to try to impose adverts on corporate users. It'd kill corporate use of Acrobat pretty much stone dead if they did, IMHO.

But personally, I don't want adverts embedded in documents I'm trying to read online, especially if they're non-static. I find flashing or animated content in on-screen text makes it far harder to actually concentrate. They're far too intrusive.

[this_is_gav]

Having read it 3 times now (as it's not clear at all), I think the idea is publishers embed links and dynamic adverts are then shown depending on the content of the document. Similar to the sponsored links you get on a Google search.

On my first read I thought that it was Yahoo adverts being embedded into the PDF if you click on a PDF direct link from a Yahoo search or something. I'd have been screaming and bawling even more than I already am if that were the case.

I've never been a fan of PDF. It's too closed of a format, so difficult to manipulate and pull information from. I'm going to royally hate it soon.

[chrestomanci]

I've never been a fan of PDF. It's too closed of a format, so difficult to manipulate and pull information from. I'm going to royally hate it soon.

You may have other reasons to dislike PDF, but it is not a closed format. It is an official and well documented standard (ISO 19005-1:2005). There are plenty of other programs, besides Adobe ones that will generate and read PDF files. Open Office, will print to PDF files. The latest beta version of Inkscape will load PDF diagrams and edit them as vector art. Under Linux Acrobat is rarely used to view PDF files, because the open source alternatives integrate better into the Linux desktop (and are open source). Meanwhile because of the way linux print spoolers work, you can have a PDF generating virtual printer that will enable you to create PDFs from any application that can print.

Not necessarily. It's only a click or 2 in Acrobat to secure a PDF from editing and printing. How secure it is I've no idea, but it's there.

As you can probably guess, not in the slightest. Acrobat honours them, but because the file format is open, anything else that opens PDF files, can and usually does ignore those restrictions. PDFTK has an '-allow' option to change the permissions on output files. It defaults to none (i.e. unless you make an effort to do different, it will silently strip off any restrictions the source document has.

Having read it 3 times now (as it's not clear at all), I think the idea is publishers embed links and dynamic adverts are then shown depending on the content of the document. Similar to the sponsored links you get on a Google search.

On my first read I thought that it was Yahoo adverts being embedded into the PDF if you click on a PDF direct link from a Yahoo search or something. I'd have been screaming and bawling even more than I already am if that were the case.

I get the impression that they are planning to distribute a modified version of PDF reader that will display adverts. If you want a version that does not display adverts you would have to pay for it.