On the heels of Facebook successfully combating ad blockers on its platform and unlocking significant ad revenue in the process, Instart Logic has released its cloud-based ‘AppShield Ad Integrity’ solution for the benefit of the broader digital publishing ecosystem.
Ad blockers have enjoyed widespread adoption among general consumers for obvious reasons: they offer a solution to a common pest in the digital age, namely, intrusive pop-up ads and videos. However, such ad blockers usually function as blunt instruments, indiscriminately blocking both annoying ads and relevant contextual ads which most users don’t mind. Moreover, ad blockers are projected to have cost digital publishers $41.4 billion in ad revenue in the past year alone. Ad blocker adoption continues to grow in leaps and bounds, posing a significant dilemma for digital publishers.
Instart Logic’s solution circumvents ad blockers and works to shield both direct and programmatic display and video advertisements, as well as native ads. It’s non-intrusive and simple to deploy, requiring only a DNS change and leaving publishers’ existing ad networks unaffected. Ad Integrity leverages its Nanovisor web application virtualization technology, which intercepts browser API calls on behalf of clients’ websites. It also uses cloud-based algorithms to seamlessly integrate ad content into websites, allowing them to escape the notice of ad blockers.
As for end-users, Instart notes that many of the premium publishers it works with have chosen to adopt limited advertising for users with ad-blockers out of consideration for their wishes. Such ad-lite approaches constitute a reasonable compromise between publishers of high-quality free content who seek to monetize their websites, and readers who don’t resent ads on principle and seek to avoid obnoxious ads, especially those that introduce malware.
Instart cites Facebook’s success in growing its Q3 desktop ad revenues by 18% year over year, promising revenue growth to those who adopt its product. It warns that those who fail to address ad blockers will lose out to the largest publishers, the five largest of which (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook) accounted for a dominant 61% share of domestic digital ad revenue in 2014. Thus far, the solution has already been deployed by many of the largest digital publishers, including several in the Comscore Top 100.
This balanced ad shield service sits atop the Instart Logic platform, an endpoint-aware application and content delivery network equipped with end-to-end security and an application performance accelerator.