NitroPay tackles high adblock rates with Blockthrough

Founded in 2017, NitroPay is a managed, data-driven platform that helps publishers boost their advertising revenue using a suite of industry-leading ad tech tools and technologies. NitroPay processes and serves 3.2 billion ad impressions each month for its 300+ web publishers, with a priority on transparent reporting, ease of integration, and robust earnings.

Gaming and high adblock rates

Given his previous industry experience, Cody Bye, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at NitroPay had been aware of the revenue leakage caused by adblocking for a long time.

“I was a publisher before we started NitroPay. My founding team and I operated large gaming sites and we knew that adblocking was an issue in the video gaming community for a long, long time,” Cody says, “Video gaming websites can have upwards of 40-60% of visitors, especially in the US, running adblockers.”

NitroPay has a lot of clients that operate sites in the “Computer & Video Games” category—which is frequently found to have some of the highest adblock rates in the industry. “It’s not a good situation to be in… your best-performing traffic needs to be able to monetize,” Cody adds.

The challenges of in-housing

Blockthrough’s adblock recovery solution works by filtering and serving ads that meet the Acceptable Ads Standard. The vast majority of adblock users are opted-in to receive this light advertising experience, which excludes interruptive formats such as animated ads, video ads, interstitials, and ads that obscure content by taking up too much space.

This method of adblock recovery represents the ideal middle ground between publishers and users. Users want to avoid experiences that interrupt their browsing journey, while publishers need to be able to monetize their content—and a lighter ad experience helps achieve both.

However, ensuring that ads meet the Acceptable Ads Standard presents an operational challenge. Virtually no major ad network, ad exchange, or SSP provides publishers with any kind of toggle for only serving Acceptable Ads, and building one in-house is time-consuming, expensive, and unusually challenging.

Prior to using Blockthrough, NitroPay tried building an in-house solution to address the problem but ultimately decided to shelve the project due to the complexity and technical challenges associated with building a filtering engine from scratch and managing it on an ongoing basis.

“We experimented with building our own Acceptable Ads filtering technology but it just proved to be way too cumbersome and the amount of revenue lift we observed was lower than what we wanted,” says Cody.

Seven-figure revenue opportunity unlocked

Within a month of the initial onboarding, Blockthrough’s Publisher Success team had activated the solution across 200+ client sites for NitroPay. On average, the sites managed by NitroPay recorded an adblock rate of 25%, with a few sites having rates as high as 40%.

In other words, these sites were losing anywhere between 25-40% of their potential revenue due to adblocking. This is the “hidden inventory” that Blockthrough enabled NitroPay to unlock.

Daily revenue for NitroPay, Nov 2021 to Feb 2022 (partial)

Thanks to its partnership with Blockthrough (launched in Q4 2021), NitroPay and its publishers are comfortably on track to unlock a previously hidden seven-digit annual revenue opportunity—while preserving user choice and experience as a top priority in the process.

“We take UX very seriously,” adds Cody. “When users are unhappy, publishers are unhappy. When publishers are unhappy, they come to us. So we need to make sure that the entire user experience is really positive and implement a solution that works for them.”