• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 7, 2024

Dark traffic, defined as visitors accessing websites that are not measured, has become a focus for some.

A new generation of aggressive ad blockers -- which Ad-Shield calls brutal ad blockers, and have about 700 million users -- is blocking analytics and measurement software that would otherwise capture publisher traffic.

This includes both general-purpose analytics solutions such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, as well as the standard ad-blocking specific analytics solutions used by publishers today.

Since blocking ads causes this, dark traffic goes un-monetized.

Ad-Shield was launched in 2023 to help publishers monetize audiences that were previously unreachable. 

Joon Yu, CEO and co-founder, originally intended to build software to block ads, but a chance interaction with a Korean gaming website owner convinced him to reconsider and build technology that can recover blocked or removed impressions due to ad blockers and maintain at least a 90% ad-block recovery rate.

Yu recently released the tool out of beta, with plans to expose a multibillion-dollar industry problem and unlock net new revenue for publishers that rely on digital advertising.

YGOSU, an Asian gaming publisher, recently realized more than 700 million website users globally that go unmeasured by publishers’ existing analytics solutions has an impact on the bottom line. The company managed to increase its overall ad revenue by more than 30%. 

On average, between 14% and 21% of a publisher’s audience is not reported in dashboards. For publishers with a younger or more tech-savvy audience, this skews higher -- between 24% and 32%.

Ad-Shield co-founder and CSO Dustin Cha believes most publishers do not realize this audience exists and can feel like “shining a light in a large dark theater” packed with people.

Analytics and ads are served through a secure virtual layer that runs on top of the browser, which ad blockers cannot access. Monetizing this means publishers can use Ad-Shield’s programmatic demand or use their own stack. The setup requires one line of script.

The company said RPMs consistently range between $1 and $3, depending on the publisher. Internal data claims that publishers using Acceptable Ads and ad-block walls only monetize up to between 20% and 30% of their ad-blocked page views.

The remaining 70% to 80% is dark traffic, caused by the use of ad blockers. Ad-Shield targets this 70% share of page views, providing net new revenue by monetizing it with ads.

It can run alongside a publisher’s existing Acceptable Ads setup, the company said.

Ad-Shield recently raised a $2 million pre-Series A funding round led by Shorooq Partners and landed ad-tech industry veterans Scott Messer and Ward Flock as advisors.