09 Nov 2026 Search

previously: journalist-owned news sites (Sunday Internet optimism, part 2)

A late good morning to AdExchanger. I was on the way to speak at Texas Linux Fest when this went up, so I slacked off on posting this here.

Gamers Love Ad Blockers. So This Site Found Another Way To Show Them Ads

What we did with this project was to sort of cheat at solving a hard problem.

One of the hardest metrics to get for a web site is the ad blocking rate. That’s because several different kinds of software get lumped together as “ad blockers”, and most of them also help the user to avoid being measured.

Ad blocking rate is impossible to measure correctly without also measuring bots. If either metric is wrong they’ll both be wrong. And bots have gotten much more numerous, varied, and mostly more aggressive. (See the DNA Lounge vs. AI scrapers saga.) Getting an accurate metric for human ad blocker users keeps getting harder.

So we used FouAnalytics to do the heavy work of bot detection.

Ad blocking data is a useful way to check if you’re reaching the right audience. How does the blocking rate for a brand’s own best customers or prospects compare to the rate in the context where they plan to advertise? If the rate is different, the audience is different. In this case, WiseGuyGaming is at 18% and has a largely AAA gaming audience.

A site that reaches more casual mobile gamers might come in lower, and a site for game developers or edgy indie games is going to be higher.

From the brand side, if you don’t measure the ad blocking rate and compare to the rates in the contexts where the ads run, you could be reaching the wrong audience and not realizing it.

For example, by now an infosec audience is going to consider most online ads as part of the insecurity department and not be reachable that way at all. If you have ever wondered why the best security vendors do so much event marketing, that’s why. The customers don’t tracker-block the bar code on their conference badges.

In any case, the higher the blocking rate, the more important the need to work directly with content brands on events and sponsored content. Brands that don’t measure ad blocking rate are likely reaching more bots and unintended audiences than anyone realizes.

But it’s worse than it appears

The even worse part is that a brand with a high blocking rate that’s looking at conventional adtech/martech metrics is going to be looking at data from an unrepresentative, more trackable fraction of the audience. And the higher the block rate, the worse that any decisions based on that data are going to be.

More later.