BlockBypass – An Aid to Publishers and Marketers

Ad Blocking has been in existence for long but it caught the Affiliate Marketer’s attention after Apple announced that it is allowing Ad Blockers in its App store. According to Statista, there were 190.5 million smartphone users in the US in 2015 which is expected to be 207.2 million in 2016 and a big chunk of them uses Apple Devices. This became a matter of great concern for publishers and affiliate marketers.

Threat of Ad Blocking

The unwanted ads are believed to deteriorate the user experience and therefore, the use of Ad Blocking software rose significantly causing the loss of $22 billion in ad revenue in 2015 globally asserted in a report by Adobe and PageFair. The report also revealed that there are 198 million ad blockers worldwide.  The second quarter of 2015 experienced 41% rise in ad blockers as compared to the number of Ad blockers a year before.

No doubts Ad blocking enhances the user experience of browsing internet but it is directly a threat to the core business of publishers and all other professionals associated with Affiliate Marketing. It is another truth that user view the desired valuable content on publisher’s website in the exchange of ads they view on the web page.

BlockIQ

Experts came up with many solutions like in-app promotion and stats to mitigate the threat of Ad Blocking by adopting sideways. BlockIQ, the subsidiary of AdSupply launched a technology called ‘BlockBypass’. It is a patented technology which works against Ad Blocking. The AdSupply CEO Justin Bunnell said that the effectiveness of BlockBypass is 75 percent to 100 percent.

BlockIQ detects the visitors using AdBlock and works on the basis of the criteria defined for the website-

• A welcome message appears on the website explaining the value of the website and the damage inflicted to the website by Ad Blocking Software.
• The content of the website remains protected behind the BlockIQ Passwall™ system until Ad Block is disabled for that particular website.
• BlockBypass shows the ads on the website in spite of the presence of Ad Block using its ingenious technology.

The patent explains the technology as –

1. Once the BlockBypass detects AdBlock, it immediately disguises the advertisement calls enabling it not to match the entries within the Adblocker’s blacklist.
2. Then the BlockBypass loader passes the advertisement call containing the encrypted original advertisement call to the bypass proxy.
3. In order to keep a check on obfuscated advertisement call passed to the bypass proxy that it is not blocked by the Adblocker, some embodiments regularly change the address of the obfuscated bypass proxy.
4. Then the advertisement is retrieved by the Bypass proxy from the corresponding advertisement server identified by the original advertisement call before forwarding the advertisement back to the appropriate bypass loader.

Conclusion:

The publishers and Affiliate Marketers can choose any of the criteria for their website. But, still especially the first two criteria are effective when the content on the website is actually valuable.  The value and desire of the user to see the content can make him disable the AdBlock software he has downloaded.

The technology is effective for all including marketers, publishers as well as Ad Networks in India who are directly associated with displaying ads as the primary source of their earning. The CEO of AdSupply also says that the engineers are continuously working on the efficiency & performance of BlockBypass which still has no discernible latency.