Man Trying to Smash “All the Ad Blockers” After Google Loses $6.6 Billion in Advertising

Google has lost $6.6 billion in advertising revenue due to third-party ad-blocking software, such as AdBlock Plus. In an effort to tackle the problem and help companies like Google reclaim some of its lost advertising revenue, former Google employee Ben Barokas has set up a new company to smash “all the ad blockers”.

Barokas sold his advertising optimisation company Admeld to Google for $400 million in 2011, subsequently becoming its General Manager of Marketplace Development. He has now left the search engine giant, though, in favour of his new startup, Sourcepoint, which claims to have the technology bypass all ad blockers.

In an interview with Business Insider, Barokas lamented the practice of many ad blocking firms for charging companies to whitelist adverts, saying, “It’s blackmail. It’s extortion. It’s not fair.”

“That being said, [ad blocking] is not against the law, it’s legal in Germany, the US, the UK … but at the end of the day it’s also legal for publishers to give people messages and say you can choose ads. It’s not fair for journalists like you not to have food at your table, it’s not fair not to have a roof over your head. It goes back to transparency and fairness … if users opt-in to having advertising subsidizing the experience, we can serve that ad, [and if an ad blocker continues to block the ads] then that would be illegal.”

Barokas’ Sourcepoint will make the websites of its customers essentially ad block-proof, and even present visitors with ad-based browsing incentives, such as clicking on an ad to unlock an article or section of the site, turning ads into a kind of pseudo-paywall.

Thank you BGR for providing us with this information.