Earning Money Through PDF Ads
Posted by Charles on September 8th, 2008
One of the most popular ways for bloggers to monetize their blog readership is through selling an ebook. One of the most successful examples of this was Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, who sold more than 10,000 copies of his ebook before switching to a training programme instead.
Traditionally ebook publishing has followed one of two models:
- Charging a fee, similar to the traditional offline book industry
- Giving them away for free, often in return for a RSS or email subscription
However, there is a new way to earn money through publishing ebooks - it could be termed ‘PDF AdSense’, a way for PDF publishers to monetarize their documents through displaying contexual ads within them, in a similar way to how Google AdSense works with websites.
Back in November 2007 Adobe teamed up with Yahoo and began testing this new advertising channel. In the words of Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president of Corporate Development at Adobe:
“We are creating opportunities for publishers to build new businesses around unique content that previously was just given away or not available to a mass online audience. As advertisers look to touch new audiences, readers can look forward to some exciting Adobe PDF content coming their way.”
At the start of July the Beta testing was officially widened with the 1.1 release of the Ads for Adobe PDF service. Specific features include:
- The ability to target specific ads on each PDF page
- Ads can be displayed in a side column or within content - screenshots can be seen here
- Access can be restricted so that PDF documents can only be viewed when connected to the internet (therefore allowing ads to be shown all the time)
The PDF ads advertising platform is still in Beta testing and is currently only targeted towards US audiences but new sites are being accepted to the programme all the time. It’s not the second coming of Google AdSense but it could be an interesting way to earn some money on the side from freely distributed ebooks.
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September 8th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
A really interesting idea if you give eBooks away. However, what happens if readers are using a different client to read the PDF? e.g. Mac OS X Preview or even something random on Linux?
September 9th, 2008 at 4:15 am
[…] interesting news about work being done by Yahoo and Adobe with adding adverts to PDF documents. Essentially the adverts are context-sensitive and interesting aspects in terms of limiting the […]
September 9th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
It’s a good question - I’d only really thought of the whole online/offline problem which they’ve actually accounted for. They mention that if you don’t have Adobe Reader 8.1 or later then you’ll be asked to upgrade. Perhaps if you’re using a different client you’ll be asked to switch to something compatible?
September 9th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Switch to an application that forces the display of advertising? Yeah, that won’t fly.
September 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Yeah I can’t imagine that creating a huge amount of goodwill around a free ebook. If it can’t be made compatible they’ll probably just accept that they can’t display ads to everyone… they’ll only be missing out on a small percentage of people.
September 9th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
The publisher has the option to restrict access to the PDF if ads cannot be displayed. This same setting covers the cases where user is offline, has an older version of Reader, or uses an alternate PDF viewer such as Mac Preview, etc. It is the publisher who makes the choice on how their content can be accessed. But you’re right, this should affect only a very small percentage of users.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Wow… That is really good.
There are millions of eBooks already on net for free and this will make some more millions of eBooks enter the market! huh!