When it comes to fighting the growing problem of adblocking, publishers are finding that being firm against the practice actually works.
This was discovered in a week-long test, which was conducted by a collective of French publishers who all took varying approaching to combat adblockers.
The approaches ranged from asking users to turn off their adblockers to blocking the user all together. The publisher with the most success however was Sports daily newspaper, L’Equipe, which took the firmest stance. L’Equipe blocked content for users using adblockers and saw around 40% of users whitelist its site.
Bertrand Gié, head of digital at Le Figaro and VP of Le Geste, the French publishing trade body that lead the adblocking trial told Digiday: “We wanted a collective movement with many publishers, but we decided we couldn’t have only one solution for us all.
“It turned out to be a very intelligent decision because all of us tried different things, and we can see what worked,” he added.
The publishers that took part in the trial were Le Monde, Le Figaro, RTE, Le Parisien and L’Equipe. Other publishers in the trial also saw positive results, with Le Figaro seeing 20% of users whitelist the site during the trial.
Major publisher Le Monde took a less agressive approach in the tests by informing users that the site was ad-funded and needed to serve impressions to pay its journalists. It saw seen 13% of people whitelist the site. Off the back of these results the publisher says it plans to run more tests in the next few months.
Industry bodies such as the IAB have attempted to combat the problem of adblocking by releasing guidelines for publishers to assist them with the problem. However the problem is only on the rise with last year seeing the problem in Australia becoming a $4 billion one.
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