Jeff Burkett from The Washington Post's presentation from the WTF Ad Blocking event in NYC - January 14, 2016.

1. 1
The Publishers Response To
Ad Blocking
Jeff Burkett
@burk504

2. 2
What’s a Pub to do?
• Are you to blame?
• % of audience blocking ads?
• Sell Thru High?
• Opportunity cost vs Recovered Value

3. 3
Opportunity Cost vs Recoverable Value
• Opportunity Cost
– Ad Blocked PV’s * RPM
• All Value Cannot be Recovered
– Programmatic will be less valuable due to low amount of cookie data in
browser
• Blockers block 3rd party tracking on Retail sites, etc
– You might not recover all ads.
• pre-roll
• Interstitials

4. 4
4 Paths to Consider

5. 5
1. Pay the Ransom?
• Pay % of ads unblocked
• Only unblocks ads they
deem acceptable
• Text
• Simple Image

6. 6
2. Subscribe to enter
Could
this
possibly
convert?

7. 7
3. Disable Ad-Blocker to Enter
42% Conversion rate at
Forbes!

8. 8
The Nuclear Option

9. 9
4. Ad Recovery
Restoring ads despite visitor having installed an ad blocker
Fireside Chat with Jason Kint and the FTC

10. 10
‘When the consumer has made
a clear choice, that choice
should be honored and if you do
circumvent that choice it needs
to be communicated clearly and
in a non-deceptive manner’
Julie Brill – FTC Commissioner

11. 11
How Ads are Blocked
and the Ways Around It
#IAmNotAnEngineer

12. 12
We are Outnumbered – EasyList

13. 13
1st Battle - HTTP Blocking
• Browser plug-ins have access to HTTP traffic as it comes in and
out of the browser.
• Blockers sniff HTTP traffic for domains and block per EasyList

14. 14
Getting Past HTTP Blocking
• Recovery solutions find ways to 'Hide' the ad traffic
– domain switching/encryption via CDN
– Diverting Ad traffic to a different Protocol from HTTP (like UDP)
• Rich Media is much harder than a .jpg or .gif
• Analytics is the tricky bit

15. 15
2nd Battle - Element Hiding
• If ad traffic is able to get past blockers then they will start to make
changes in the browser to hide the ad.
– Collapsing Div’s
– Covering ads with white boxes
• Recovery Solution must
– Confuse the blocker to be unable to hide/cover ads
– Have a method to reverse anything that the blocker does

16. 16
Takeaways
• Start by determining the damage being done
– Resources might be better spent elsewhere
• Choose the right path based on your goals
– Ad $
– Audience growth and Engagement
• Pubs are in this together
– The more who battle this, the more successful we will be
– Share ideas…connect our dev teams…keep talking to vendors

17. 17
Thank You
@burk504
jeff.burkett@washpost.com