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Adobe Taps Yahoo to Sell Ads in PDF Documents

Files published in Portable Document Format aren’t the most plentiful pages on the Web, but they represent a pretty large available audience. Adobe says it has distributed approximately 500 million Acrobat readers globally, which are used to read everything from archived versions of print magazines to regional newsletters to instruction manuals. Now the software giant is eager to determine whether the documents can join in the digital advertising jamboree that’s powered so much other free content.

In a deal with Yahoo, Adobe has begun offering publishers the ability to monetize their PDF files with contextually targeted text ads. While it admits ignorance regarding the size of the market opportunity for such ads or their ideal surroundings, a beta program launched today aims to get some of those answers. IDG InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation, and Reed Elsevier are among the first to offer up their subscription and legacy PDF formatted content for free under the test.

“We don’t know which [content types] will dominate,” said Kurt Garbe, Adobe’s entrepreneur in residence, advertising. “We’ve looked at a cross-section during the pre-beta. Certainly the reprint market is a very big potential market.”

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