How Blockthrough reclaimed 10 billion pageviews for Venatus

Venatus is an award-winning, global AdTech platform that connects advertisers to the audiences of 350+ world-renowned gaming publishers who trust Venatus to monetize their content and communities.

For advertisers, Venatus provides unmatched access to exclusive gaming inventory globally. For publishers, Venatus enables enhanced content monetization through successful, long-lasting partnerships.

By partnering with Blockthrough, Venatus unlocks new capabilities for both.

Assessing the problem

Venatus assists premium gaming sites such as Op.gg, Futbin, Aternos, Planet Minecraft, and HLTV with effectively monetizing their content.

Acknowledging the portion of users that use ad blockers, Venatus sought to create new opportunities to generate incremental revenue for publishers.

To address the impact ad blocking can have on publisher monetization, Venatus conducted vendor evaluations and selected to partner with Blockthrough—who specialize in delivering a lighter ad experience compliant with the Acceptable Ads Standard, effectively working to restore lost revenue.

Little-effort, big-reward product

Alongside its parent company, eyeo, a global leader in ad-filtering solutions, Blockthrough’s approach hinges on delivering sustainable revenue growth by striking the optimal balance between user experience and monetization, making it a little-effort, big-reward product.

Blockthrough’s integration with Venatus only involved adding a single-line JavaScript snippet into its page headers.

The technology is simple yet powerful. The Blockthrough script has two parts: A detection component to identify the presence of an ad blocker, and a core ad-serving capability to connect demand and build an efficient stack.

Blockthrough’s technology filters programmatic advertising based on the Acceptable Ads Standard, which was created with the user experience in mind. By providing a lighter ad experience, publishers can provide their users a better browsing experience while still monetizing their content.

This not only provides Venatus with added inventory for direct sales but also, in the naturally lighter ad environment associated with ad-filtering, improves viewability and CTR performance

10B pageviews in new inventory

Over the past three years, Blockthrough’s partnership with Venatus has generated more than 10 billion pageviews in reclaimed inventory, resulting in huge gains in incremental revenue for Venatus’s publishers.

Due to the revenue gains that the Blockthrough solution provided, Venatus saw significant growth year-over-year for the total number of publishers live with Blockthrough.

In turn, Venatus’s publishers saw an impressive average RPM (revenue per mille) that continued to increase each year.

(Total live sites and RPM growth with Blockthrough, 2020 to 2023)

The Publisher Success team at Blockthrough continuously rolls out new feature upgrades and optimizations on priority for Venatus, including demand from Google AdX, Amazon, and Blockthrough Exchange, as well as an Acceptable Ads compliant implementation of ad refresh.

“Blockthrough’s ad-block revenue recovery solution is unmatched in the market. We have never needed to look into other alternatives due to the continuous growth and improvements being made throughout the course of our partnership,” Dave Barr, CRO at Venatus, commented. “It is a great revenue product that our publisher partners can all benefit from.”