Are Adobe's new PDF Ads totally useless?

When Adobe announced a new platform for placing advertisements in PDF documents in November we were a bit concerned -- but only a tiny bit. We were fairly certain you'd be able to avoid seeing these ads by using alternate PDF viewers like Foxit or PDF XChange. And now that ad-enabled PDF documents are starting to pop up, we can tell you that we were right.

But even if you're using Adobe Reader 8, it turns out that it's pretty easy to avoid advertisements. If you load up a document that has ads enabled, all you have to do is click a little X button to make it go away. And while we weren't able to replicate his results, Digital Inspiration's Amit Agrawal reports that he got a pop up message when he tried loading a file asking him if he wanted to see ads.

Now, given that most people are trained to click yes whenever they see a pop up box, and many people are too lazy to look for the little X box, it's possible that a significant portion of the folks who download ad-enabled PDF files will actually be exposed to the ads. But if you're a publisher trying to make a few bucks on a book or article, we're thinking there might be better ways to go about it than using an ad scheme that's so easy to ignore.

If you want to take an ad-enabled PDF document for a test drive, you might want to try out the eBook True Films by Kevin Kelly.

Tags: advertising, kevin-kelly, pdf, true-films