Publishers could recover millions of dollars they are currently losing to adblockers, according to Blockthrough CEO Marty Kratky-Katz. Here, he makes a case for ad recovery solutions like his company’s.
Why have publishers given up on adblockers?
For one, there’s a valid concern about category fatigue. Because many of today and yesterday’s adblock recovery tools failed to consistently deliver recovered revenue, many publishers simply wrote off the whole category. Another form of resistance comes from those worried about further alienating users who have clearly demonstrated an aversion to ads. But the truth is that on average, around 70% of all adblock users that visit sites within our portfolio have actually opted in to seeing ads, even though they’re using an adblocker. They just want their ad experience to be less interruptive to their content consumption experience.
How could adblocking technology have helped BuzzFeed, HuffPo, and Vice?
Not sure if adblocking revenue recovery can save a publisher (there are many other pressures on the modern publisher), but we sure can help the bottom line. Today recovering this revenue should be table stakes for publishers. There are hundreds of millions of dollars left on the table that publishers can easily get back each year. But there are reasons why publishers are hesitant and we get that. Our job is to convince publishers to adopt an advertising recovery solution like ours. Now I’m in no way saying that gaining back some of the revenue lost to adblocking is a panacea for all publishers. But I am saying that in a market where media companies have to fight to stay alive – how many jobs might be saved (or perhaps even created) if a publisher was able to earn an extra million, half-million or even a few hundred thousand more dollars per year? That’s what’s at stake right now, and that’s the question I urge every CRO, or head of programmatic or even ad ops lead to ask themselves.
How has the technology changed?
Lots of people use ad blockers – 615 million or more, worldwide, which is up 30 percent year over year, according to PageFair (we acquired them late last year). Additionally, just recently, Google announced that they are going to roll out Chrome’s ad-blocking feature this July. In short, ad blockers are not going away. However, as I pointed to earlier, a majority of those who use ad blockers are fine with seeing ads to some extent. The question then revolves around if an ad is acceptable or not, which is the premise behind the solution that we provide at Blockthrough. When a publisher uses Blockthrough, and when users visit the site with an adblocker enabled, our technology kicks in and serves them an ad that meets acceptable standards. Blockthrough’s intelligent revenue recovery solution works within the Acceptable Ads framework – striking the balance between helping publishers recoup the most revenue, while providing ad experiences that users are OK with (and avoiding incurring the wrath of the most hardcore ad avoiders).
How much can technology like Blockthrough’s recover for publishers?
We say around 70% of what was lost to adblockers, but each publisher’s results will vary based on channel use, userbase, etc.Because there is finally one adblock recovery solution that works, we see a lot of pubs coming around to making Blockthough a must-have in the stack. I think the Blockthrough solution finally fits the market. The fact that we are up 99.9% of the time, we use the publisher’s existing monetization partners to optimize yield, and that our solution is not a headache to implement makes the decision easy. Believe it or not, there are some circumvention solutions in the market that require publishers to mess around at the CDN-level to re-construct pages – which take months to install and barely perform. Such solutions are not viable options for 99% of publishers.
More publishers are coming around to the fact that ad blockers will not be going away, and that there is a sustainable way to recover millions of dollars lost to ad blockers with an acceptable lightweight ad experience.
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