Issuu turns your print documents into online ads with new AdPages

Document publishing platform Issuu pitches itself as a place where people who produce beautiful print documents can share them online. Now it’s allowing its users to turn those same documents into ads.

With its new AdPages service, users can compete for their documents to receive placement in the ‘promoted’ slots in the sidebar of a related document’s page. This is a similar model to promoted search results on Google or Promoted Tweets on Twitter. Advertisers set a daily budget and only pay when their document is actually opened by a site user.

In the example below, Little White Lies, a UK film and music magazine, has been placed alongside the London Jazz Festival guide. Issuu says that in the first 12 hours of this campaign going live, the promoted document had 175,000 placements and approximately 600 reads with almost a minute reading time per read.

Essentially, this is repurposing existing content as online advertising. Issuu documents open in a full-screen viewer in the browser, meaning that they certainly capture the reader’s attention in a way that subtle sidebar ads don’t.

Of course, this kind of advertising is only effective if there’s a large potential audience. Copenhagen-based Issuu says that its site has 50 million monthly users and 3.2 billion page impressions per month, meaning that it’s at least worth a try for anyone wanting to get a bit more out of their print advertising budget.

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