BlockBust Aims To Help Publishers Thwart Blockers

Tiller, an ad management platform for publishers, has created BlockBust, a product intended to help publishers recognize which parts of their sites are vulnerable to ad blocking.

Publishers can go to blockbust.io and type in a Web address, which is scanned for code that gets caught by ad-blocking software. Then they click "send fixes" and input their email address for a free report.

They will get a list of the flagged terms that a blocker would pick up and a recommendation to rename or avoid referencing the domain in question. (Hint: the words "ad" and "advertising" are no-nos.) And of course, they will get a recommendation to optimize ads with Tiller's platform. 

Stephen Gill, co-founder and CEO of Tiller, answered a few questions by email on his way to SXSW.

First, I asked whether the release of BlockBust was planned in tandem with the IAB's DEAL release (more info here).

Gill said no -- that it was an independent project, although the company believes the LEAN and DEAL programs provide excellent long-term guidelines for increasing user trust.

Real-Time Daily:  Is a BlockBust report available for free to anyone?

Stephen Gill: Because ad blockers are quickly destroying the foundations of democracy, we decided to make BlockBust free for all publishers. This is our way of encouraging the community to fight back by enabling publishers to quickly scan for vulnerabilities on their sites and take action. 

RTD: What are typical paths/IDs that BlockBust picks up? 

Gill: We’ve identified 48,117 rules that ad blockers use to prevent ads from displaying. Those triggers are a combination of blocked IDs, classes, other CSS selectors, domains and paths. Publishers can fix many of these blocked paths with code updates. The most common types of blocked code strings are identifiable ad containers, certain tracking codes or pixels such as analytics and known ad serving domains. Every site has its own unique code, and an individual BlockBust scan is required to fully diagnose vulnerability to ad blocking.

RTD: What inspired BlockBust?


Gill: Ad blocking is a problem we wanted to help solve. Our engineers initially conceived of the idea during a Tiller hackathon. We then spent months refining the product and tackling the technical complexity of figuring out exactly what triggers ad blockers to prevent advertisements from displaying.

BlockBust is the first tool of its kind. It arms Tiller and the industry with even more data to fight back against ad blockers.

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