• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 1, 2016

It’s probably true advertisers can now reach their best audiences quicker via the Internet, but it may also be true that publishers are wasting a lot of Internet power on pretenders that are just gumming up the works and slurping up publisher data in the process.

Stopping that is the idea behind PubTools, a new tool from DashBid that hopes to give publishers a dashboard to let them discover and ultimately quickly disable the advertising and rogue tracking scripts on their pages, and figure out how that’s affecting the site itself  Then it measures how much of this stuff is part of a publisher’s ad blocking problem, and analyzes who’s on the receiving end of  the leaking data.

If a lot of ad tech solutions are all about making things happen, it seems this PubTools dashboard is largely about making bad things stop happening.
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While AdBlocker Plus or Ghostry installs a toolbar on the user’s browser and allows the user to choose what to block, PubTools allows the publisher to chose what is blocked," said Tom Herman, the DashBid CEO.  "The point being, if a publisher is seeing in-banner video ads in their 300x250 display units and they are not authorized to run there-- like someone’s buying their display units  and jamming video ads in there--the publisher can choose to block it.  They can say, for example, that they don’t have a relationship with some ad tech companies and should not be dropping scripts or ads on their page,  and then block it. 

"This is important because many customers have said to us they can’t understand how come there are so many different companies dropping pixels on them and slowing down or sometimes crashing their users browsers," he continued, via email.  "With PubTools they can see those scripts, see how they got there, and block them without the user being forced to go get a blunt instrument, like AdBlock Plus to block the bad actors."

PubTools also offers new ways for publishers to highlight their own performance, and, for example, show advertisers real images of where their ads were placed, and corresponding performance data.

“The ad tech business is kind of a mess and personally I believe the ad block problem is all our fault,” says Herman.

That’s because as ad tech firms have finessed their buy techniques, publishers sometimes are victimized.

The supply-side platform is still tinkering with PubTools, he told me, but expects to go to market with it soon.

He suspects there’s an eager market out there.  

The trouble is that when a publisher puts out a bid for advertisers, the respondents’ ad tech, analytics, and tracking apparatus often overburden the site. And a lot of those of respondents aren’t really likely to advertise; they’re just collecting intelligence. Or the JavaScript they provide is so leaden it slows down page loads considerably

When DashBid has probed what’s going on under the skin of a major publisher--let’s say a newspaper in a big West Coast city--it found scripts coming from over 500 third party bidders. That’s not that extreme; Herman says an average site is loaded down with at least 100, and all of that action tends to slow down Website load times.

And that angers and frustrates users. Which leads to ad blockers.

Herman says the buy and sell environment is decidedly one-sided, information-wise. “Publishes are ceding control to the buy side and the 'middle' middle man,” he says.  “And the buyers don’t really care about the  overall user experience. That leads to a really bad experience for audience and for publishers. Publishers should really be able to slice and dice. But the buy side has controlled all the data.”

pj@mediapost.com