A Flaw With 'Funding Choices' (From A Publisher's POV)

Inside Google’s Ad Manager and AdSense it’s possible for publishers to setup an ad block wall that’ll display a message to visitors accessing a website with an ad blocker turned on. This is under the ‘Funding Choices’ set of features.

This intent of this message is to encourage visitors to disable their ad blocker for the website. There’s two options:

• Soft wall — visitors can dismiss the message and continue to access the website’s content without disabling their ad blocker.

• Hard wall — visitors are unable to to dismiss the message and can only access the website’s content by disabling their ad blocker.

In principle this sounds pretty straightforward and dependable from a technical capability standpoint. But, there’s a problem. It doesn’t work as well as it suggests — breaking much of the time.

Many websites use this solution, so it’s an expensive problem going under the radar. For high-traffic sites, it works out to millions of dollars per year in lost revenue.

One of the most high profile websites that uses this solution is the MailOnline. So, let’s use it as a case study here.

The problem

What should happen?

A visitor accessing a webpage should be greeted with a message like this:

This MailOnline message is a hard ad block wall. The only option presented for the visitor is to click ‘Allow ads’ or leave the site.

By clicking this button, the visitor gets shown a follow up message advising them how they can deactivate their ad blocker:

Instructions for 3 popular ad blockers are presented for the user to select:

1. Adblock Plus

2. AdBlock

3. uBlock Origin

For Adblock Plus and AdBlock this whole experience works just fine. The message loads and it’s clear how to deactivate them on the instructions screen. The reason for this is these two ad blockers allow ad block wall messages to be served, according to their policies.

However, the third instruction for uBlock Origin is ridiculous.

Why?

If the visitor is using uBlock Origin, they will never see this message because uBlock Origin blocks it.

From testing just now, one of two scenarios occurs:

1. No message loads at all

2. The first message loads, but the message upon clicking ‘Allow ads’ gets blocked

Neither of these outcomes work as intended, as shown below:

This got me wondering, for how many other ad blockers is the Funding Choices message either blocked or broken? I tested a few more:

• AdBlock Unlimited (600k downloads) — doesn’t load

• AdBlocker Ultimate (6.2m downloads) — doesn’t load

• AdGuard (160m users) — doesn’t load

• Ghostery (100m+ downloads) — doesn’t load

• Brave (70m+ users) — doesn’t load

• DuckDuck Go Browser (50m+ downloads) — doesn’t load

• Pie (500k downloads) — doesn’t load

• uBlock Origin Lite (1.1m downloads) — doesn’t load

• Stands AdBlocker (2.2m downloads) — doesn’t load

For these ad blockers, the message did not appear at all. Collectively they have hundreds of millions of users.

And, that’s just scratching the surface. There’s dozens more popular ad blocking software products out there I did not test.

To make matters worse: these ad blockers also tend to block tracking of any kind, so they are not measured and counted in any dashboard. Other words: publishers can’t even see there’s a problem in order to deal with it.

Bottom line for publishers?

The Funding Choices ad block wall message only works for a fraction of ad blocking traffic. The ratio of this depends heavily on the profile of audience a website attracts.

If the audience is younger and tech savvy, expect the message to work with 20-30% of total ad blocking traffic. If it’s more of a mainstream audience, expect it to work for around 50-60%.

Many publishers will feel comforted by the fact the message works with Adblock Plus and Adblock (because they’re perceived to be the most popular ad blockers). But, collectively they control less than 30% of the ad blocking market as measured by page views generated — leaving a big blindspot.

Adblock Analyst

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