Barely a year after Adobe Systems put out a call to find a cross-section of publishers interested in helping to test drive a potential new service for placing dynamic ads in PDF-based publications and documents, the company notified its group of beta participants about the cancellation of the ad-enabled PDFs project.
Economic climate drives decision to cancel
According to Stefan Offermann of Adobe, the decision to discontinue the Ads for Adobe PDF Beta program was a reaction to the current economic climate. In a letter [PDF: 49kb] to the project's publisher partners, Adobe explained that the cancellation was primarily "due to a reassessment of priorities in the current economic environment" and that the global economic meltdown is causing the company "to focus on other products and services for the publishing industry, such as Acrobat Professional, Creative Suite, Adobe Digital Editions, etc." In December 2008, Adobe announced a layoff of some 600 employees worldwide.
The Ads for Adobe PDF service was a partnership with the Yahoo! Publisher Network in which content-relevant ads could be dynamically placed in PDF files, generating income for the content owners and publishers. It was similar in nature to Google's popular AdSense service, which places contextual ads in HTML-based web pages.
A variety of publishers were involved in the Adobe-Yahoo! experiment, with a goal to make it easy for publishers to add contextually relevant ads to PDF-based content--by automatically matching advertisers with topical content, and by providing a means to track performance of the ads. In April 2008, AcrobatUsers.com published a range of sample PDF publications with ads.
At that time, an Adobe project manager for the beta service said "We have seen interest from all types of publishers, including ebook publishers, non-profits, professional organizations/societies, magazine publishers, technical-journal publishers, educational institutions and bloggers, to name a few."
Ads for Adobe PDF has been removed from the Adobe Labs website, an area where Adobe provides early access to some technology-in-progress products and services.
Adobe and Yahoo! partnership still strong
The discontinuation of this service doesn't necessarily signal the end of cooperation between Yahoo! and Adobe, according to Offermann. 'We want to emphasize that Adobe and Yahoo! continue to work closely together on a variety of projects," he said, "and we remain dedicated to creating the most innovative products and services for creative professionals and the publishing industry."