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On 28th November Adobe and Yahoo! announced their partnership to display ads in generated pdfs.

[...]an opt-in service that enables online commercial publishers to drive new revenue by including timely, contextual ads next to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)-based content[...]

[...]Ads can only be displayed within Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat, in a panel adjacent to the content so that they do not disrupt the viewing experience. Every time the PDF content is viewed, contextual ads are dynamically matched to the content of the document. The publisher can then monitor performance through detailed reports.[...]

You can read the press release here.

I think in terms of business it is a great move from Adobe and Yahoo!. Free content are mostly based on advertisement (who says that free cannot be profitable ?) the world of Ebook stayed until now an island free of advertisement, soon going to change but maybe for the good of knowledge.

My concern is more coming from the popularity of Adobe Reader, by reading some comment in the blogosphere I noticed that most of the people were not so much interested by the ads but by the Adobe Reader times of launching.

GED: [...]Adobe locks up my browsers 3 out of every 4 times it loads in a browser[...]

Patrick: [...]Don’t forget about new viruses being created and filtering through Adobe Reader. It’s going to be a whole new can of worms to deal with. I hate when Adobe locks up in the browser until it decides to load the document for viewing…. it’a already almost like a trojan horse in that respect[...]

Eli: Awesome! I was wondering how Adobe was going to make Acrobat Reader even more of a bloated monstrosity than it already is. What a better way to expand its memory footprint than to integrate some kind of ad management function. I hope they use Flash ads for this. I can smell the sweet aroma of burning RAM already!

Comment from different part of the web…

It is interesting how security related questions comes when talking about Adobe Reader, also some people wonder how will the ads behave in an offline mode. Will there be a default ads displayed and that will update itself if online? Can the ads be block by changing the proxy settings?

Those comment make me think that it maybe a good idea for product but not for customers, and that the Adobe Reader really needs to get improved. It is still a mystery for me why Adobe cut the distribution of Macromedia Flash Paper (used to be distribute in Studio 8 but I couldn’t find it in any CS3 pack). The idea of embedding pdf document in a web pages was great and useful and could also solve the problem of ads by staying in a advertised environment.

If however you want to test this advertisment program, and you are located in the US, the beta is here

Ahmet