Advertisements are a part of life. They always have been and they likely always will be. As long as there are businesses with stuff to sell and people to buy those products or services, there will be ads to promote their existence and nudge you to buy. For websites using ads it’s less about the bottom line of how many things they can sell and more about the fact that ad revenue is a source of income just like a paycheck or salary is for everyone else, but this fact sometimes does little to persuade people against using ad blockers. A former Google executive has come up with a solution which takes aim at ad blockers in a rather ironic way, by developing a blocker for ad blockers.
For Ben Barokas, the development work on his new piece of software that will help to block ad blocker software isn’t just about helping the website publishers, it’s also about putting more choice in the hands of viewers of these websites as well as the publishers, which Barokas details is the main issue with the ad/ad block ecosystem. His company, Sourcepoint, seeks to provide viewers with options on how they would choose to continue viewing content on a website which has the adblock – blocker in place. If the user has an ad blocker installed, publishers with Sourcepoint’s software could give viewers multiple choices like opting into viewing ads, paying for a subscription, or it could allow multiple ad viewing options like one ad per story etc.. It could also simply allow publishers to bypass the adblocker altogether. At the moment, Sourcepoint’s software is being made available to a smaller group of around 24 leading publishers for free with analytics tools as well as the software to blocking software to bypass the ad blockers.
Sourcepoint’s mission is to make the transaction between digital publishers and viewers more transparent so that there is a better understanding of the fact that even free content costs something. With a better understanding of these details and choice in the hands of both the viewer and the publisher, Barokas and Sourcepoint hope that adblockers become less of an issue.