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Adobe Teams With Yahoo For Ads in PDFs - Flex Apps Next?

Thu, 2007-11-29 11:30 — mikepotter
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Adobe and Yahoo have teamed up to allow advertising inside of PDF documents. I can see this being useful for a few applications that publish newsletters and documents in PDFs - similar to how some bloggers (like me) use Google AdSense to monetize HTML content. However, the real value to you and other readers of this blog should be the hope that this might lead to the ability to put ads inside of RIAs.

Currently its extremely difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to monetize an RIA that you've built. You can try what Picnik is doing - adding features available to Premium Members only, but there's no real payment framework available to repeat that for many applications. Meaning you'd have to write your own payment infrastructure and handle all the customer service interactions on your own.

Some people are trying to solve this with AIR applications, but there's no one that I know of working on a solution for in browser Flex applications.

I don't know how developers will monetize the applications that they build in the future, but I do know that its great news that Adobe and Yahoo are working together in some fashion. Here's hoping it doesn't stop at PDFs.

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Thu, 2007-11-29 13:04 — Nick (not verified)

Hopefully Not...

I felt quite different after reading that article. It seems to me that the internet is becoming a cesspool for ads, which upsets me a little. I remember back when you could look at webpages and maybe see a banner ad at the top, but that was it. Nothing too flashy, and not overwhelming. Now it seems there's nary a webpage that displays content without some sort of advertisement.

I really do believe that enabling the masses to create applications without much trouble has yielded some interesting (and great) results, but "with great power comes great responsibility." Creating applications that let good engineering practice fall to the wayside and slapping ads everywhere on the web to monetize anything and everything seems an abuse of power if you ask me. Making it easier to do such in other media (PDF, Flex) by having Adobe and Yahoo team up is just asking for trouble.

Fri, 2007-11-30 12:50 — Ryan Campbell (not verified)

What I'm Working On

Hey Mike,

I've recently released a classified ads product based on Adobe Flex that I not only use myself but sell monthly licenses so that others can start their own classified ads service with it.

One of the things I am always working on is creating new ways for my clients (and myself of course) to increase revenue. At the moment I have 2 solutions:

1. I've made use of the PayPal API within the Flex application to allow ad posters the ability to pay extra to be a "featured ad". The only challenge with this was that the user had to leave the Flex application temporally to login/authorize a payment on the PayPal website. I am currently working on Flex/PayPal Integration Kit and will be doing a session on this at the 360|Flex conference in Atlanta.

2. I developed a way to display Google AdSense ads within the Flex application using relevant content based on what the user is currently viewing. Basically, the ads are in a IFRAME which hovers over the application and contains hidden text based on the same text currently displayed in the Flex app.

I'm planning on blogging about both of these solutions very shortly.

For an example check out:
http://www.petsbc.com

To read more about my software visit:
http://www.safaricreative.com/classifieds/

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