Blockthrough, which helps online publishers recoup advertising dollars from ad blockers, announced the acquisition of PageFair, an analytics technology company that measures more than 12 billion page views per month. The idea is to combine Blockthrough’s ad-blocking recovery technology with PageFair’s Adblock analytics platform.
Marty Kratky-Katz, Blockthrough founder and CEO, will lead the combined company. Sean Blanchfield, PageFair cofounder, and CEO will stay on for at least three months to advise the management team.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“In the next six months I think we can double our revenue based on this acquisition,” Kratky-Katz said. “When you’re a publisher and have 10% to 20% ad impressions to sell, you’re revenue goes up. I believe we can increase revenue by a factor of five to 10-times, from 2018 to 2019. We launched three iterations of the product focused on circumventing the ad blocker. We found a lot of problems with that approach.”
Here is the statement from Pagefair CEO and founder:
We are pleased to announce that Blockthrough has acquired PageFair. Together, the combined company is the clear leader in adblock mitigation solutions, and will offer the industry’s highest-yielding adblock revenue recovery solution from Blockthrough, combined with the ubiquitous PageFair analytics platform, plus market insights derived from data spanning a combined 10+ years of experience helping publishers tackle adblocking.
In 2012, PageFair foresaw adblock’s impact on digital publishers and we dedicated the intervening years to help publishers navigate the adblock revenue loss problem with transparency and integrity. I am very proud of the incredible team members who helped us build PageFair into a trusted industry brand. They succeeded not only in getting the adblock problem recognised as a top priority for the media industry, but they also built truly innovative technology that recovered millions of dollars in revenue for hundreds of quality websites around the world.
Although we got to know the folks at Blockthrough as competitors, we soon learned that we both shared a resolve not only to stanch the leaking of critical media revenue to adblocking, but also to fix the underlying problem with ad quality and provide a balanced end-user experience. We are especially excited to encourage all publishers to migrate to Blockthrough’s adblock revenue recovery solution, which is sustainable and performs substantially better than any other in the industry while respecting the user. Now that we have joined forces, publishers have a single go-to vendor for adblock measurement and mitigation.
As we combine our companies, the fundamental value that PageFair has provided publishers will remain unchanged. Our trusted adblock analytics platform, which has given many thousands of publishers real-time insights into how adblock affects their businesses, will remain free for use. Meanwhile, the widely relied-upon annual adblock research report will continue to be published, with the next edition already in production.
We thank our publishers and partners for your support on this journey. We look forward to continuing to work closely with you all on the promising future that lies ahead for publishers, PageFair and Blockthrough.
Onward and Upward,
Sean
CEO & Co-founder
PageFair