Ad blockers are probably publishers' worse enemies.
The software block ads from running on websites, making visitors experience ad-free pages on websites that depend on ads for revenue. And with the popularity of ad blockers and the rising number of publishers using intrusive ads, more and more people are using ad blockers on the web.
"Ad blockers designed to remove all ads from all sites are making it difficult for publishers with good ad experiences to maintain sustainable businesses," wrote Google Product Manager Varun Chirravuri. "Our goal for Funding Choices is to help publishers get paid for their work by reducing the impact of ad blocking on them."
Funding Choices is a program created as part of Google’s “Coalition for Better Ads” efforts, and is aimed to help publishers recover lost revenue from ad-blocking software their visitors use.
Google said that publishers that use Funding Choices are seeing 16 percent of site visitors choosing to allow ads to run on their website. Some publishers are said to get positive response rate to as high as 37 percent using the program.
The company even said that more than 4.5 million visitors who were given the option to allow an ad via a Funding Choices message said yes, resulting in more than 90 million additional paying page views.
Using Coalition for Better Ads, Google also block intrusive or "bad" ads by default using its Chrome browser.
For this reason, Google expands its Funding Choices ad messaging to 31 more countries, almost a year launching it for publishers in North America, the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
"Funding Choice gives publishers a way to have a conversation with their site visitors through custom messages they can use to express how ad blocking impacts their business and content," said Google.
What this means, when a visitor landed on a website using ad blocker, the program allows the site to display one of three message types to that user:
A dismissible message that doesn’t restrict access to content
A dismissible message that counts and limits the number of page views that person is allowed per month, as determined by the site owner, before the content is blocked.
A message that entirely blocks access to contents unless the visitor chooses to see the ads on the site, or pays for access the content (either through the site’s subscription service or a pass that removes ads through Google Contributor, a paywall alternative from Google).
