November 29, 2007

Making Your PDFs Pay, (and PS Next Stop - Last.uni?)

I got really excited today by the widely reported news item that Yahoo and Adobe were teaming up to provide ads for PDF...

I imagined containers within the PDF document that would be populated with Yahoo ads at download time, ad selection coming from both content analysis of the surrounding PDF text, and personalisation based on Yahoo's ad platform knowledge of the person downloading the document.

Just like widget containers on your site that allow third party sites to pipe their advertising to your page (giving you a percentage commission on any revenue they generate from that placement) I imagined the platform dynamically injecting ads directly into the PDF document, or at least, adding them into Adobe Acrobat/Reader views of the document.

But it's not like that at all :-(


When a recipient opens a PDF document from a commercial publisher participating in this program, ads will be dynamically matched and displayed in a panel adjacent to the content. The publishers are eligible to be paid for valid clicks on the ads. Adobe has partnered with Yahoo! to provide ads across a broad range of categories to match PDF content. Since the ads come from Yahoo!, publishers do not have to establish and maintain direct relationships with advertisers.

Never mind... the thought was amusing while it lasted ;-)

PS by the by, the 'container ad insert' model scales in all sorts of other directions too. I remember hearing a podcast some time ago (I can't find it now :-(, in which podcast pioneer Doug Kaye was taking about the production pipeline for IT Conversations podcasts. Textual metadata was used to pull in audio production credits at the top and tail of a podcast, and there was also a mechanism (I guess?) for pipelining in audio ads. This was all done offline, I think, (although maybe the ad inserts were regenerated/updated every so often to keep them current?). If anyone knows of a white paper - or other write up - about the architecture of that platform, I'd appreciate a link...

PPS having mentioned IT Conversations, I guess I should also mention the Conversations Network, "a listener-supported non-profit podcast network brought to you by a global team of passionate audio/video producers and editors." As well as IT Conversations (where you can catch many of the talks presented at the various O'Reilly conferences as well as Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators), they produce Media Conversations (which carries Future Talks, "an interview-style program with futurists Glen Hiemstra and Gerd Leonhard") as well as a couple of other channels...

What might be of even more interest to OUseful.info readers (or at least Martin, who dreams of Last.uni) is the Conversations Network CN Recommendation/Queue System:

personalized recommendations are based upon your ratings of other programs you have heard combined with how other members have rated the same and additional programs. If [a recommended program] is a program you'd like to hear, you can play it immediately, download it to your computer, or add it to your Personal Program Queue (PPQ) for later listening.

The contents of your PPQ can be delivered as a podcast. Think of your PPQ as a playlist over which you have complete control. You can add and remove programs from the playlist and change their order. And because it's a podcast, you can subscribe to it in the same way as you can subscribe to other podcasts. The only difference is that you have no control over what's in the feeds you get from most podcasters; you get what they want you to hear. But with The Conversations Network PPQ, you can subscribe to a podcast that contains precisely what you want to listen to.

Just to be clear, your PPQ podcast feed contains the programs in your queue. Every other member has their own PPQ podcast feeds containing the contents of their own queues. (Yes, you can share your feeds with others, even non-members. You control the playlist for your friends and family.)

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Posted by ajh59 at November 29, 2007 09:35 PM
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