3 Questions to Federico Nieves, Retargetly’s CTO
A chat with Federico Nieves, CTO of Retargetly, on the ad-blocking situation and the company’s latest development: Mockingbird, an open-source plugin to fight ad-blockers.
“We decided to make Mockingbird an open-source project, so we can start solving the problem together and we make a better ecosystem for publishers, advertisers and users.”
Why do you think so many users in LatAm are installing ad-blockers?
I believe that the big wave of digital advertising as an alternative way for publishers to make quick money, was received and applied much faster than we could understand.
The need for content networks to monetize their time and efforts had the counterpart of not being fully capable to understand which was the impact of those new implementations for the user experience.At the beginning, when programmatic wasn’t still on the map, display ads were just in-site images added as a result of private deals with brands. Those ads were planned and implemented as being part of the site, so they had to be created seamlessly.
Today is different. Programmatic buying made it very easy to start monetizing sites by just adding tags on it. This was a huge benefit for content creators as they just needed to focus on users acquisition (boosting their traffic), leaving advertisers acquisition to DSPs platforms.
Some publishers kept focusing on user experience, but many among them started to maximize revenue by displaying as many impressions as possible per pageview. This harmed the user experience, not only because it can be annoying, but because all that javascript running together can make navigation slower. This, along with users’ poor consciousness about advertising being a source (sometimes the only one) of revenue for several publishers, made a great combo for an early and fast ad-blockers adaptation.
The use of Ad-blockers can harm publisher’s at a financial level, as many of them count on display ad as an income source. Technically speaking though, how can the use of ad-blockers harm a publisher?
Ad blockers use different rules to detect ads inside a website. Some rules are css-driven. The ad-blockers would then receive the command: if a block has a “class ‘ads’”, hide it. Others base the recognition of ads on the url that is being called. In this case the command would be: if url is “/ads”, block it.
Both techniques aren’t entirely accurate though, so if a publisher has “ads” on its name, or some blocks within its site have an “ads” class, even if this doesn’t correspond to an actual display ad, there may be a malfunction of the site. Also because many sites have advertising as part of their schema, blocking them may also produce some errors within the site.
Why did you (the team) decided to create Mockingbird as an open-source code plugin?
At Retargetly we want to help the online advertising ecosystem grow. Given it’s pros and cons, there is no deny that is a huge industry that’s been helping content networks produce rich online content, and brands make themselves present on users mind.
When the idea came out we saw that Mockingbird was more than a fit, not for our products, but for the industry itself. It can create awareness and solve a big problem that publishers and advertisers are suffering today. That’s why we decided to make it open-source, so we start solving the problem together and we make a better ecosystem for publishers, advertisers and users.
