BlockBypass is the advertising industry's answer to AdBlock

Feb 1, 2016 18:00 GMT  ·  By

A new service aimed at helping online publishers counteract users that employ ad-blocking browser extensions when accessing their sites is being rolled out.

This new tool is called BlockBypass and was developed by BlockIQ, a subsidiary of AdSupply, an advertising network.

BlockBypass is based on a new patent awarded to AdSupply last year. This patent provides a simple mechanism that allows online publishers to mitigate the damages caused by the rising trend of ad-blocking extensions like AdBlock or AdBlock Plus.

A study from Adobe and PageFair from August 2015 revealed that ad-block technology usage went up 41% compared to the previous year and caused damages of $21.8 billion (€19.6 billion) in ad revenue.

BlockBypass works as a proxy between users and the ad servers

All ad blockers work on the same principle, employing a blacklist of domain names from where ads are loaded. Employees from ad-block companies manage this list, but special algorithms are also used to dynamically detect ads and add their domain to the blacklist in real time.

The BlockBypass technology would allow publishers to hide the location of the ad server from where the ad is being downloaded.

BlockIQ plans to use several BlockBypass proxies, which will sit between the ad servers and the end users.

When a user accesses a site, their browser would load the website's source code, but instead of a hard-coded ad domain name, the publisher's server would deliver the address of the BlockBypass proxy.

"BlockBypass uses a cipher to encrypt or otherwise obfuscate the domain name, hostname, Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or other address or request of the advertisement call," the patent reads.

A game of cat and mouse

This workaround allows BlockBypass to mask the advertiser's ad domain and deliver the ad without the ad-blocker intervening. But as the ad-blocker lets the browser load more content from the same encrypted domain, across time, it will eventually catch up with the BlockBypass proxy and mark it as an ad domain.

This is why BlockIQ designed BlockBypass to automatically change its random URL at regular intervals, effectively entering into an infinite game of cat and mouse with ad-blocking scanners.

Internal statistics have shown that BlockBypass has an efficiency between 75% and 100% in delivering ads to users with ad-blockers installed.

Besides the ad-block bypassing feature, BlockBypass also includes two other features that show a warning to users with ad-blockers installed and even prevent the site's content from loading if the user does not disable their ad-blocker extension.

AdSupply's CEO Justin Bunnell has told MarketingLand that there are currently about a dozen companies currently testing BlockBypass on their sites.