Yavli joined the emerging fray of ad-blocking technology solutions for publishers with its public launch on Wednesday, following an 18-month stealth period.
Its technology gives users who have downloaded an ad blocker sponsored content suggestions. If the user clicks on the piece of sponsored material, the publisher charges the brand.
“The idea behind it is simple,” said Yavli co-founder and CEO Tom Yeomans in an email to AdExchanger. “Ad-block users love to consume content, not ads.”
The solution assumes audiences will support branded content if it’s something they’ve explicitly chosen to see. Yeomans declined to detail how the patent-pending tech works.
“Marketers aren’t really factoring in the percentage of their target audience that are unreachable due to ad blockers,” Yeomans said. And while Yavli’s 100 or so beta publishers haven’t released specific figures, Yeomans said the solution has accounted for revenue “well into the seven figures.”
One company that’s been involved in the beta test is Publir, which manages editorial and marketing content for a portfolio of publishers.
“The publishers we represent have growing ad-blocker audiences that are highly vocal,” said Josh Varanelli, Publir’s director of ad operations. “We needed a solution that monetized these visitors effectively without creating an attritional experience, and it works.”
As other publisher-side ad-block solutions have proposed, the key is to rethink the user relationship, not to overpower the technology behind ad blocking. Yavli, for instance, can recognize a site visitor with ad block downloaded to his or her browser, but accepts that as a legitimate user choice.
Ultimately, a poor online experience is the real enemy, not ad blocking itself.
Other emerging ad-block countermeasures take a more brute force approach, encrypting ads so they can’t be recognized by ad blockers. But companies like Adblock Plus, which produces the world’s most popular ad-blocking software, have all the leverage – meaning a legion of tech-savvy followers who attack sites that punish ad-block users.
Yeomans is hoping that publishers adopting solutions like his – and other newcomers to the market such as Sourcepoint – fall into a new category, where the rights of ad-block users are respected without sacrificing reliable ad revenue.
