The new service is being pushed by the Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo campaign, announced today.Currently the service onlys upports text ads but Yahoo and Adobe plan to roll out graphical and rich media ads too.
While the ads may bring a bothersome annoyance to some previously ad-free documents, which had previously been free of advertisements, they may have beneficial effects as well. Scientific journals may elect to put their content online for free, subsidized by advertisement revenue. The benefits or merits of this are debatable, but many will feel that the more available information, the better.
The service is entering its beta phase. Adobe has announced Yahoo is its exclusive ad provider at least for the beta phase, but has not announced when the beta phase will end or if it will open up to other advertisers, such as Google.
All PDF content providers will have to do to participate is upload their documents to an Adobe/Yahoo portal and the documents will be retrofitted with embed ads and returned to the publisher. Adobe is designing APIs to simplify this process and make it extremely easy and convenient for content publishers.
Source: DailyTech