Krátký-Katz: Ad blockers destroy ad value by disabling secondary tracking technologies
Marty Krátký-Katz · Marty Krátký-Katz, Founder of Blockthrough (Bootstrapped to ~$100M exit) | How Never Giving Up Le... · PMF Show · Mar 8, 2024 · at 16:29
Marty Krátký-Katz, co-founder of Blockthrough, discusses the technical hurdles in circumventing ad blockers and monetizing ad block traffic for digital publishers.
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“Ad blockers don't just block the ads. They also block all the secondary technologies that make the ads valuable to buyers. So that could be, you know, cookies for targeting. It could be you know, attribution technology technologies that measure whether the ad was seen or whether it was clicked. Or that could be, you know, technologies that actually detect whether it was seen by a real human as opposed to a bot. It's one thing to get the, what it, what we would consider to be visually the ad to bypass the ad blocker. It's a totally different set of technical problems for each of those secondary technologies. And if you can't restore all of them in real time at all times, then either the ads will not be worth anything. They'll be worth, you know, pennies on the dollar.”
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Krátký-Katz: Outsider status helped Blockthrough spot ad-block recovery opportunity
“The people who are most skeptical about the space were ad tech people. I would talk to them and they would say, well, like, oh, ad block users don't want to see ads. That's why they're blocking them. And that, that sounded intuitive to them, but You know, to u…”
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“The vast majority of us ad block users are not militant ad haters. We just, you know, are really annoyed by a handful of obnoxious experiences, like, you know, pre-roll ads on YouTube.”
Krátký-Katz: The 2015–2018 cohort of ad-block circumvention startups mostly failed
“There was actually a whole like generation of ad block Circumvention solutions like ours that, that started in that 2015 to 2018 period and like either flamed out, failed, you know, sold for pennies on the dollar or ended up, you know, pivoting away.”
Krátký-Katz: Blockthrough revenue jumped from $100 to $96K in six months
“We go a hundred dollars in revenue the first month, a thousand dollars the second month. 10,000 the third month, 20,000 the fourth month, 48,096 thousand, like.”