Here’s what happened in 2021

Happy New Year, folks! We hope that you were able to unwind for the holidays and spend some time with your family. As for us, we took some time to reflect on the previous year and realized that we have a lot to be grateful for. And naturally, we’d love to share the highlights with you.

We recovered $40M in publisher revenue

In 2021, we launched our adblock recovery product on 3,474 new websites. In all, we helped our customers monetize 30 billion adblocked pageviews and recover $40M in ad revenue, approximately doubling YoY from 2020.

Thanks to this impressive 2021 growth, we further cemented our status as the undisputed market leader in adblock recovery. Market analyses consistently show that we recover more revenue, monetize more adblock pageviews, and work with more publishers and individual websites than any other adblock recovery company globally.

Of course, this is just the first step in our mission to enable publishers and advertisers to build sustainable businesses by delivering advertising experiences that respect user choice.

Became a multi-award winning company

Of course, it’s nice to be recognized for the work we do. And we couldn’t do it without our team. So we want to take this moment to say thank you to the amazing Blockthrough team members for the hard work that led to Blockthrough winning the following awards:

• Programmatic Power Player by AdExchanger (Jul 2021)
• Adweek Readers’ Choice Award for Best Adblock Recovery Solution (Jul 2021)
• Great Place to Work award (Aug 2021)
• 11th Fastest-Growing Company in Canada by The Globe and Mail (Sep 2021)
• Deloitte Companies-to-Watch Award (Nov 2021)

And a huge shout-out to Leela Fallah, our Director of Publisher Success, who was named an “Up and Comer” at the Top Women in Media Awards (Dec 2021) presented by AdMonsters and Folio.

Our team size doubled for the 2nd year in a row

At the start of 2021, we were at a headcount of 20, having already doubled over the course of 2020. But in order to continue rapidly scaling our business and wowing our customers, we knew we needed to keep investing in expanding our very talented team. 

To that end, over the course of 2021, we grew our team by 125%, hiring top talent across the globe and finishing the year with a team of 45 amazing individuals.

Included in that expansion was the creation of 4 brand-new departments:

• Data Science
• Demand
• Partnerships
• RevOps

These new departments are focused on optimizing publisher yield, activating new demand opportunities, fostering stronger industry relationships, and developing an internal mission control center for automatically detecting anomalies in revenue performance for any site powered by our technology.

We released the 2021 PageFair Adblock Report

Originally launched in 2013 by adblock recovery pioneer PageFair (which we acquired in 2018), the annual PageFair report is renowned for being the online advertising industry’s gold standard for gauging worldwide adblock adoption.

In addition to its regular analysis of adblock adoption trends, the latest edition included a major survey of US consumer adblocking habits which broke new ground in a few key areas:

• It taught us that Adblock users are twice as likely to accept light, non-intrusive ads rather than engage with adblock walls or pay for content
• It confirmed that user preferences about ads and privacy (a) vary substantially from person to person and (b) fall on a spectrum as opposed to being binary, as the industry and privacy advocates generally assume.
• It strongly suggested the existence of a “dark matter of adblocking”; i.e. growing consumer adoption of forms of adblocking that block the very technologies designed to detect them, causing publishers to significantly underestimate their site-level adblocking numbers

Here are some other key insights from this year’s report:

• Mobile adblocking grew 10% to reach 586M users
• Desktop adblocking grew 8% to reach 257M users
• 63% of top US Comscore publishers reviewed in this report were using some type of adblock countermeasure, up from 56% last year
• User adoption of Acceptable Ads is growing fast, reaching a total of 218M users by the end of 2020, with 435% growth on mobile over the last two years

Download your copy of our 2021 PageFair Adblock Report to learn more. And of course, stay tuned for the next edition of the report, which will be published later this year!

We win when our customers do

Blockthrough released three customer case studies in 2021 highlighting our success with some of the largest and most trusted names in online publishing, including:

Healthline Media (#22 Comscore rank)

Key result: More than $1M in ad revenue recovered by Feb 2021 (and counting…)

What they said: “Healthline previously worked with another vendor that had a convoluted process of recovering ads with less-than-stellar account management. Blockthrough has responsive white-glove service for us.” — Chris Acosta, Director of Programmatic

Freestar (#13 Comscore rank)

Key result: 1.4 billion adblock pageviews monetized across ~300 sites

What they said: “Freestar is thrilled with the results we have achieved through our partnership with Blockthrough. The implementation is ultra turnkey, light on the page, and allows us to recover significant levels of ad blocked revenue.” — Matt Burgess, VP of Revenue Operations

AccuWeather (#1 on Similarweb in the weather category)

Key result: 240 million adblocked impressions monetized

What they said: “We tested a handful of solutions, including a message wall approach, before we ultimately decided to go with Blockthrough for the team and their thoughtful approach to both revenue and user experience.” — Steve Mummey, SVP of Digital Ad Revenue and Technology

It’s been a good year, now on to the next one

We’re excited about what 2022 has in store for us, as well as for you. (Maybe another delay for Google’s third-party cookie deprecation? But who’s keeping count…) Thanks for taking the time to read about our 2021; we hope that you have an amazing new year!