Publishers are increasingly desperate to try any means necessary to claw back lost advertising revenues from online videos, and this week Faultline Online Reporter caught up with a start-up company called Publica, which provides anti-ad blocking software that claims to boost ad revenues by 20% and increase website loading times by 1.5 times.
Co-founder of 7-month young Publica, Benjamin Antier, explained that users of ad blocking software consume more video on average than those who don’t use it – presenting a base of online video viewers with some big advertising monetization opportunities.
Publica’s software works in two stages; firstly, it uses discovery analytics to detect and monitor how ad blockers are affecting a business; and secondly, it recovers advertisements from an ad server with minimal latency to begin the monetization process.
The initial detection is carried out on the client-side, and the clever part is done using server-side ad stitching technology which works ads directly into the video stream so ad blocking software would need to block the content in its entirety, and therefore just serve blank video. But Publica says it goes a step further by getting the publisher’s requests unblocked, and then reinserts ad elements through a proxy server – ensuring us that these reinserted ads are user-friendly.
Antier explained that taking a client-side route for the recovery stage of anti-ad blocking has its drawbacks, describing it as a “cat and mouse game,” because it creates new URLs over and over, whereas server-side is a one-time implementation. In turn, this results in a faster site loading time by saving back and forth requests between the server and client.
Recently back from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in Florida, Antier noted that Publica supports two of the IAB’s specifications for serving video ads – VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) and VAST (Video Ad Serving Template). He pointed out that around 80% of video ads support VPAID, which involves lots of client-side components, but claimed that where Publica differs from its competitors is that it can also support VPAID on the server-side.
The IAB is the standards body which last year banned Adblock Plus, the industry’s most well-known ad blocker, from attending the summit, and IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg very publicly slammed the company. Rothenberg was reportedly up to his usual tricks again this year, adamant in the illusion that ad blockers are not a threat to the online advertising industry.
Rothenberg must also be blocking the market research reports from making it into his inbox, because the results are clear to see. PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report finds that the number of devices globally blocking ads reached 615 million at the end of 2016, growing 30% year-on-year. Mobile ad block usage is also surging, now surpassing desktop to account for 62% of total devices worldwide.
eMarketer has also published results of a recent study showing that mobile now accounts for 72% of the entire US ad spend, and this will grow to $65.87 billion by 2019.
Adblock Plus has a significant head start on companies like Publica, having written its first ad blocking code back in 2006, plus the added support of an enormous community effort built up over the years. Although Antier claimed that ad blocking software hasn’t evolved much since its inception, and despite Publica’s immaturity, the company has a deep understanding of what makes Adblock Plus tick.
Publica currently has about a dozen trials with publishers, all under NDA for the time being, and Antier noted that his company aims to relieve the growing anxiety among publishers, by encouraging alternative formats such as skippable ads.
Installing ad block walls is another method being adopted by websites, but PageFair reports that 77% of ad block users will jump ship when encountering a wall.
Some companies can afford to take the ad block bypass route, called the Acceptable Ads Initiative, run by Adblock Plus. The program was proposed as the community decided that not all ads are equally annoying or disruptive. Companies can apply for their ads to be accepted and bypass the blocking software, as long as they meet specific criteria – which includes not being intrusive of the content, not being misleading as part of the content, meeting specific size requirements, not auto-playing video or sound and many more.
However, Antier added that companies have to pay out a hefty sum for this privilege – denying Adblock Plus’ claims that smaller companies don’t have to pay, but those with over 10 million ad impressions have to cough up a fee.
Publica competes with the likes of Brightcove, Instart Logic, Ooyala (which uses Secret Media), and Anvato, the company recently snapped up by Google.