Originally, Ad-Shield Co-Founder and CEO Joon Yu intended to build software to block ads, not for ad block recovery.
But a chance interaction with the owner of a popular Korean gaming website that was struggling itself afloat on the small amount of digital ad revenue it was earning, convinced Yu and his team to reconsider its business model.
“We understood that we were removing or blocking the ads, but we didn’t think about the impact for the smaller publishers,” Dustin Cha, Ad-Shield’s chief strategy officer and Yu’s co-founder, told AdExchanger. “That was really the aha moment.”
Now Ad-Shield’s pivot is complete. On Thursday, the startup announced the launch of its ad block recovery software after 10 months of beta testing.
The new goal? Helping publishers measure and monetize what Ad-Shield refers to as “dark traffic,” which sounds more sinister than it is.
Afraid of the dark
Dark traffic refers web traffic that comes from unmeasured – and therefore unmonetized – sources. It’s often misrepresented in web analytics platforms as direct traffic, if it gets reported at all.
According to Ad-Shield, dark traffic can represent up to 32% of a publisher’s audience, depending on how young and tech-savvy they are – which is another way to say how likely they are to use an ad blocker. Ad-Shield estimates that around 700 million users globally fall into the dark traffic bucket.
Whereas earlier versions of ad blockers would usually allow users to whitelist certain publishers or types of ads, the newer generation (which Cha calls “brutal ad blockers,” compared to the previous “soft” ones) doesn’t leave room for any kind of interaction with users.
Brutal ad blockers essentially cut users off from everything a publisher might use to register their presence on a site, including ads, measurement tools, ad block walls (meaning the messages you get from websites asking you to whitelist them) and even consent messages.
Ad-Shield’s software is able to break through and serve ads to those users anyway on a virtual layer that sits atop the browser that ad blockers can’t reach.
The ads that Ad-Shield deems “allowable” follow a similar standard to what industry initiatives like Acceptable Ads and the Coalition for Better Ads recommend, including no pop-ups, interstitials or autoplay ads.
Everything the traffic will allow
Despite how many people use ad-blocking software – 32.5% of users worldwide, says a recent global survey from DataReportal – very few seem to be militantly against the idea of online advertising.
“Over 80% of ad block users are open to seeing ads,” Cha said. “They’re not using ad blockers because they want to see zero ads. They are sick and tired of disruptive ads.”
DataReportal also reports that 63% of ad blocker users claim they do so because “there are too many ads,” while 54% say that “the ads get in my way.”
But ads that appear on sites using Ad-Shield’s technology generate higher-than-average click-through rates, Cha said.
Even so, some people just don’t want to see certain ads.
And so Ad-Shield also provides infrastructure that allows publishers to give users opt-in control for specific ad types. So far, though, no one has used it, Cha said.
Still, the constant arms race between ad blockers and advertisers could lead to some spammier content getting through the cracks. According to Cha, the team is already thinking of ways to address this issue.
Finding your audience
For now, though, results have been positive.
Many of Ad-Shield’s existing clients in Europe and Asia – including the website owner who inspired its heel-face turn – have reported increases in ad revenue, even when displaying fewer ads per page than before.
As the company continues its US rollout, it’s also planning to explore tools for advertisers and publishers to directly address audiences that use ad blockers – in a GDPR-compliant way, of course, Cha emphasized.
Because publishers deserve to monetize their dark traffic.
“Ad block users are a very, very attractive target audience,” Cha said. “These are 20 to 40-year-olds [with] high disposable income that are tech savvy.”
