The Math of Yahoo’s PDF Ads
November 29th, 1999 | Published in Out Loud
I’m going to take a stab at this Yahoo/Adobe announcement, since Yahoo didn’t apparently take the time to think this through. According to the Paidcontent article, which quotes WSJ and AP sources, publishers can now include contextual ads in their PDFs. Here’s why this is dumb:
- Selling ads isn’t hard if you’re doing it right. If your product is good, and your sales people are competent, you can make money. If it becomes hard, then perhaps the deals are too small, in which case, the prospect of splitting revenues with Adobe and Yahoo isn’t going to be any help.
- Laying ads out on the page isn’t hard, thanks to a recent revolution in desktop publishing (Oy! Heard of InDesign, Quark Xpress??). They sometimes look better than auto-generated text ads, too.
- Assuming #1and 2 are difficult, then you’re going to have to make up the difference in volume, which means you’d better go learn HTML fast, since PDFs aren’t going to get you the audience you need (It’s pretty incontrovertible that your Web audience is going to be larger than that reading PDFs).
- Finally, somehow Yahoo and Adobe are going to have to convince advertisers that having their ads disappear when the PDF is printed out is a good idea. I mean, isn’t emulating the print ad/edit relationship the whole point of PDF advertising?
Yahoo and Adobe need to sit down and think about how they can actually make publishers “new” money, not just insert themselves into an already functional business process. They may make it “easier” for some publishers, but it’s extremely doubtful that this program will deliver solid ROI for any of the parties involved. I don’t think the math is works out on this one.