Tool for publishers to assess likelihood of ad delivery

Tiller, an ad management platform for publishers, has created BlockBust, a first-of-its-kind product to help publishers recognise the parts of their websites that are vulnerable to ad-blocking. Stephen Gill, co-founder and CEO of Tiller, said in a recent interview that ad-blocking is a problem the company wanted to help solve, because it is destroying the foundations of democracy. 48,117 rules were identified as being used by ad-blockers to prevent ads from displaying. The main triggers were found to be a combination of blocked IDs, classes, other CSS selectors, domains and paths. The company says publishers can now fix these issues with free BlockBust scans to fully diagnose vulnerability to ad-blocking and the application of code updates.

by Felicia Greiff , March 14, 2016

Tiller, an ad management platform for publishers

, has created BlockBust, a product intended to help publishers recognize which parts of their sites are vulnerable to ad blocking.

Publishers can go to blockbust.io and type in a Web address, which is scanned for code that gets caught by ad-blocking software. Then they click "send fixes" and input their email address for a free report.



They will get a list of the flagged terms that a blocker would pick up and a recommendation to rename or avoid referencing the domain in question. (Hint: the words "ad" and "advertising" are no-nos.) And of course, they will get a recommendation to optimize ads with Tiller's platform.

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Stephen Gill, co-founder and CEO of Tiller, answered a few questions by email on his way to SXSW.

First, I asked whether the release of BlockBust was planned in tandem with the IAB's DEAL release (more info here).

Gill said no -- that it was an independent project, although the company believes the LEAN and DEAL programs provide excellent long-term guidelines for increasing user trust.



Real-Time Daily: Is a BlockBust report available for free to anyone?

Stephen Gill: Because ad blockers are quickly destroying the foundations of democracy, we decided to make BlockBust free for all publishers. This is our way of encouraging the community to fight back by enabling publishers to quickly scan for vulnerabilities on their sites and take action.

RTD: What are typical paths/IDs that BlockBust picks up?

Gill: We’ve identified 48,117 rules that ad blockers use to prevent ads from displaying. Those triggers are a combination of blocked IDs, classes, other CSS selectors, domains and paths. Publishers can fix many of these blocked paths with code updates. The most common types of blocked code strings are identifiable ad containers, certain tracking codes or pixels such as analytics and known ad serving domains. Every site has its own unique code, and an individual BlockBust scan is required to fully diagnose vulnerability to ad blocking.

RTD: What inspired BlockBust?

