Sorry for the vanishing act, a period of being unwell and of course Nick in the Army now! means we were a little light on posts.

Which one is the devil?
Unless you have been living under a large stone for the last week you couldn’t have failed to notice to massive corporations signed a rather large deal. As of last week limited tests were being carried out to provide PDF writers the ability to embed adverts into their PDFs. The adverts are provide by Yahoo and are on a PPC basis, if you happen to live in the US you can run along and join the beta program for the rest of us we will have to be content with the information on the Adobe Labs site.

So how does it work?
PDF writers upload their finished works to adobe site, the PDF is then scanned and adverts inserted into the PDF. These ads will then display in the right hand side of Adobe Reader see a screenshot. A couple of obvious limitations jump out of you, the ads will only be displayed in Adobe Reader, and no doubt will make your PDf unusable in other readers, what happens when the Ebook is read offline? I know it might not have occurred to Yahoo but we don’t all live in a connected 24/7 world.

So will it work?
Well Ebooks have something of a bad image indeed Jon the admin at Wickedfire went so far as to create a thread providing backdoor access to some of in his opinion worst Ebooks out there. The idea was if people saw how bad these books were people wouldn’t waste their money do I condone his actions? Not really but I have even less sympathy for the Ebook writers many of whom are scam artists. On an interesting aside the stunt has sort of backfired with the thread becoming one of the most popular threads on the board with people requesting books not as Jon hoped to see how bad they are but to save buying them. Advertising in Ebooks is normally done through affiliate links, sponsored pages etc in much the same way as traditional magazines use advertising. The medium doesn’t allow much flexibility so this new revenue stream may tempt people to drop or remove prices from their Ebooks this for many books would be a good thing but ultimately you are placing your faith in a locked system which many people will not be part of, it is like having your advertising running through an ActiveX control.

PDFs in Search results
One indirect benefit of this hook up will be the technology used to scan documents to determine what ads to place this could have a direct effect on how Yahoo Crawls and ranks PDFs in search results, this could mean an increase in PDFs on the front page of SERPs. Many people ignore PDFs and other media in their search strategies but it maybe time to re-evaluate this.

Final thought
Currently Adobe and Yahoo currently only plan to show ads on PDFs that have passed through their filter system but the functionality will be (or is) built into every Adobe Reader how long before they press the button and include ads in all PDFs? If that is a scary thought have a look at Foxit PDF reader as an alternative for windows.