As of 01/16/2009 Adobe closed their site for ad-enabling .pdf files to integrate ads inside the .pdfs. I for one thought that .pdf advertising would be great for the internet why? I’ve got about a million .pdf files created through my business directory. Of course after learning that I couldn’t easily integrate the ads from Adobe and Yahoo Publisher Network, I never joined the program.

However, tons of my .pdfs are indexed by the search engines, and it bugs me that I can’t make any money from that except for the backlink to the site inside the aforementioned .pdf. I do have some other static and very popular .pdfs I would very much like to ad-enable, but no publisher allows it, and Adobe probably isn’t interested any more due to the failure of their beta with Yahoo.

They probably didn’t get a whole lot of interest, simply because nobody wants to ad-enable a .pdf file one at a time via a web interface. They should simply create some type of limited API for the .pdf to insert the ad into pre-defined blocks. Hell, they could at least have an ad block inside their reader they could make money with through the .pdf publisher, and have a back end sign up for the ad program through Acrobat itself.

There’s tons of doable ways to make ads work inside .pdfs. But primarily, they need to have a way for developers to embed context-sensitive advertising inside .pdfs through programming tools like Crystal Reports, etc…

They should have went into business with Google instead of Yahoo, and they should definitely exploit their widespread .pdf format for advertising purposes. Every day they don’t have ads inside every single .pdf on the web is a day they lose money.