Ads in PDFs – This Space for Rent

What Scott Karp has been lacking in quantity is more than made up for in quality this week, with a particularly insightful posting on the possibility of selling ad space in e-books:

How much do you think a company that sells geostatistical software
would pay to reach someone reading a book about geostatistics? Do you
think there might be a match there?

You’re probably expecting me to declare now that books should be
free and subsidized with ads. But what if you can still sell the
content AND sell ads? Ask newspapers if that was ever a good business.

Scott’s post is extremely timely, coming on the heels of Adobe’s announcement that you can now (at least try to) monetize your PDFs. The relevance to this for BtoB publishers is in Scott’s point that ad serving into content isn’t about the quantity of eyeballs, but the quality of the reader. If your readers have a specific need that your advertisers can fill, there’s money to be made.

The funny part is that Adobe doesn’t seem to have much interest in "quality" advertisers. Any publisher who tries to sign up for the Ads for Pdf beta gets asked a lot of questions about the quantity of readers they have – not what they might be interested in buying.