How do I monetize ad block traffic with Blockthrough?

At Blockthrough, we help some of the world’s largest media brands recover their ad-blocked revenue—but what does that actually mean?
To understand the problem that ad blockers present, let’s take a look at how publishers typically monetize their content in a normal non-ad blocked environment.
- A new user lands on your website.
- The ad auction is initiated.
- All the vendors within your existing ad tech stack (demand partners, SSPs, ad exchanges, etc.) are called into play.
- The bid with the highest value is selected by the ad server.
- The winning ad creative is rendered on the webpage.
- The user views the ad (an impression).
- This impression generates the ad revenue needed to fund your business operations.
However, what happens if the ad auction never begins? You’re effectively stuck on step 1. If an ad creative is blocked from ever displaying on your website, you will not be able to monetize that site visitor.
In the 2021 PageFair Adblock Report, we revealed that over 800 million devices were blocking most forms of digital advertising across the globe. This is coupled with the fact that most publishers have an ad block rate between 10-40%, which translates to billions of advertising dollars (almost $12B by 2020) being forfeited to ad blockers.
This is what we mean when we say “ad-blocked revenue”.
In order to avoid leaving this revenue on the table, you can use one or more of the few available ad block recovery strategies to monetize ad block users.
What’s the best ad block recovery strategy?
There are 3 types of ad block recovery strategies available to publishers.
- Ad block circumvention
- Message-based recovery (soft and hard walls)
- Acceptable Ads
Ad block circumvention
Ad block circumvention re-injects ads back into the webpage by exploiting technical loopholes in how ad blockers detect ad units. However, the last ad block report presented that 81% of surveyed users said that they downloaded an ad blocker to avoid interruptive ad experiences.
Re-injecting ads and forcing them upon ad block users blatantly ignores their Web preferences and perpetuates the same bad advertising experiences that they wanted to avoid in the first place. It is also not a sustainable solution and leads to unpredictable results, as vendors need to constantly update the circumvention logic to keep up with the ad blockers.
Message-based recovery
Message-based recovery, or pop-ups, are a little easier to spot. If you use an ad blocker, you may have seen some of the following pop-up walls.


Ad block walls can be used as a means to communicate with your ad-blocking audience on the importance of ads for free content. While they can be seen as a blocker to content, they can be used effectively to convert users and recover more revenue.
Niche publishers or sites with a dedicated user base will be most successful with ad block walls. If users can easily find your content elsewhere, they are likely to bounce when they see a wall.
Ad block user messaging doesn’t need to be a standalone solution—it works well with Acceptable Ads as well.
Acceptable Ads
Acceptable Ads is a standard, governed by an independent, non-profit organization called the Acceptable Ads Committee (“AAC”). The AAC is tasked with defining a set of light, non-intrusive ad formats that can be served to ad block users who opt-in to view such advertising. At the same time, it disallows interruptive formats such as animated ads, auto-playing ads, and interstitials.
The standard consists of well-researched ad formats that take user experience into account to determine which formats are considered “acceptable.”
For example, in-content ads were recently added to the Standard, as it was supported by an exhaustive user research study. By monetizing with Acceptable Ads, publishers stand to recover revenue lost to ad blockers, without making any changes to their site or disrupting their user’s experience.
Acceptable Ads can also be used to continue to monetize users who dismissed your ad block wall and continued to your site. While you can’t monetize them with a full ad experience, you can see show light ads.
How do I get started with Acceptable Ads?
In theory, any publisher can join the Acceptable Ads program. However, in practice, it is easier for larger ad tech platforms (like Google or Amazon), as they have full control over their advertising stack and can easily ensure compliance with Acceptable Ads. Publishers who rely on third-party ad tech partners may not have the same resources to filter ads for compliance.
That’s where a dedicated Acceptable Ads provider like Blockthrough comes in.
Our ad filtering technology is built to ensure compliance with Acceptable Ads. In other words, we can recover your ad-blocked revenue while offering your ad block users a lighter ad experience.
How does Blockthrough accomplish this?
Blockthrough uses a lightweight (<5 KB) detection script that checks the following conditions:
- Is an ad blocker present? We only monetize ad block users. Non-ad block users are monetized as per your existing ad tech setup and are not affected by Blockthrough.
- Has the user opted into Acceptable Ads? Ad blockers that participate in Acceptable Ads give users the ability to opt-out. In order to respect a user’s preferences, we only monetize ad block users who are opted into Acceptable Ads.
If either of those conditions are not met, the script shuts off.

Earlier, we described how monetization works in a non-ad blocked environment compared to a situation where an ad blocker is enabled. We learned that the ad blocker stops the ad creative from rendering, which results in the publisher failing to monetize that user.
Now let’s see what happens in an ad blocked environment, but with Blockthrough present.
- A new (ad block) user lands on a publisher’s website.
- The user’s ad blocker blocks all ad tech scripts and now the publisher’s inventory cannot be auctioned.
- Blockthrough’s detection script is fired.
- It first checks if the user is using an Acceptable Ads-supported ad blocker and if the user is opted-in to Acceptable Ads.
- If both conditions are satisfied, the detection script will then restore the publisher’s existing demand.
- The ad auction is now re-initiated and looks to fill the publisher’s inventory.
- The publisher’s demand partners respond with numerous bid responses.
- Blockthrough adds a unique ID to each response.
- After creating a pool of compliant bids, Blockthrough then selects the bid with the highest CPM.
- The winning bid is rendered on the page.
In this scenario, you are now able to monetize your ad block user without compromising their experience by showing them Acceptable Ads-compliant creatives.
But how do we find a compliant creative in the first place?
Sourcing a compliant ad creative via ad filtering
As your existing monetization configuration was disabled by the ad blocker, we will need to reload your ad tech stack in an Acceptable Ads-compliant environment. This involves scanning all creatives to check for compliance. Here’s what the ad filtering process boils down to.
- As mentioned in step 8 above, we add a unique ID to each response (bid creative).
- We cross-reference this unique ID against our library of scanned ad creatives.
- Then, we check if this is,
- a new creative that needs to be scanned or,
- a creative that has already been scanned and deemed compliant as per the Standard.
- Assuming that it passes all the specifications outlined in the Standard, the creative is then rendered on your website.

Now that we have established that the ad creative is compliant with the Standard, we can serve that ad to ad block visitors on your site.
In summary
There are over 800 million devices across the globe that block ads. The primary motivation behind this is to avoid intrusive, annoying Web experiences. As a result, publishers are losing billions of dollars in ad revenue globally.
In order to stop this revenue leakage, publishers can use Acceptable Ads to recover their ad blocked revenue in a respectful, consent-based manner.
Blockthrough helps publishers comply with the Standard and recover advertising revenue using a lightweight script and proprietary ad filtering technology. We offer easy integration, universal header bidding compatibility, and most importantly, sustainable incremental revenue.
Speak to our team to learn more about our recovery solution.
Frequently asked questions
- Which ad serving technologies do you support?
We’re wrapper agnostic, this means that we’re compatible with all header bidding wrappers (including Prebid.js) and can integrate with most SSPs and ad servers, including AdX and GAM.
- I don’t use Prebid or GAM, what are my options?
No problem! For header bidding, you can use our existing demand relationships to get started. Similarly, you can use Blockthrough’s GAM account for serving ads on ad blocked inventory.
- Do I need to change my existing setup to use your GAM account?
Using our GAM account does not require you to change your ad serving configuration for your regular traffic. You would simply use our GAM instance for the ad block environment.
- Do you use a global blocklist?
We have our own—but we can include individual advertisers that you would like to block.
- Can’t I simply create my own ad block recovery solution?
You can, however, building a filtering engine for Acceptable Ads compliance requires a high level of time and cost investment to get right. We suggest reading our NitroPay case study first.
- Do you support direct demand?
Yep, we support direct as well.
Ready to get started with Blockthrough? Fill out our form below to speak to someone on our team today.