It was announced yesterday that PDF files are to have advertisements within them, following a new deal between Yahoo and Adobe.

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I find unnecessary advertising in places where it isn’t relevant a bit annoying. Being an early adopter of the Internet, I remember the days of several search engines struggling for superiority, before Google started to dominate the marketplace.

I think there were two main reasons for this, one Google was quick and seemed to bring up the best and most accurate information and two it didn’t have blatant advertising on its home page with irritating pop up boxes coming up every time you ran a search etc etc.

Google decided to take a different route and I believe that’s why it prevailed as the number one search engine.

I think Internet companies are going to have to get the balance right if they want people to keep using their services. However, if they just keep condoning advertising in every and any place to try and stimulate revenue, they could find themselves quickly losing customers.

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.