Everyone is battling ad blockers, from publishers to ad tech companies. At last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit, Complex Media’s CEO Rich Antoniello says ad blocking is “a really serious thing” for him in particular: Up to 21 percent of his audience uses ad blockers, an increase from just 8 percent a year ago. (The company even fines its own employees who use ad blockers. Antoniello said, “the cookie jar is filling.”) Kenneth Suh of Unruly called ad blocking “the topic du jour,” though we’re only in the early days of the phenomenon. Here’s what publishers and ad tech companies had to say on ad blocking.
More in Media
In Graphic Detail: AI visibility is no longer about referral traffic
New data shows why publishers are developing strategies around agentic traffic and brand visibility in AI answer engines.
‘It’s a CEO conversation,’ Accenture and Whalar on their playbook for the creator economy
Brian Yasko, managing director at Accenture and Emma Harman, co-CEO of Whalar, on the massive creator economy acquisition and future plans.
WTF is LLM honeypotting?
Publishers and e-commerce brands under siege from AI crawlers are starting to fight back with an old security trick updated for the LLM era: “LLM honeypotting.”