A new mediator in the war against ad blockers has arrived, Oriel, a SaaS platform launched today (January 26), with the aim of helping publishers lower the guard of their extension-using audience.
Oriel’s technology, which allows publishers to “analyse, communicate and re-engage” users of ad-blockers with messaging, will persuade audiences to whitelist ad-funded content in what its founder describes as “fair value exchange”.
Private trials have so far consisted of over 100 global publishers in highly-affected industries – primarily games, technology, news, blogging and social – where Oriel has seen whitelisting rates of up to 40% among ad-blocking users.
User-centricity
While more than a few publishers have taken matters into their own hands, the service seeks to open up a discourse between both parties according to CEO and founder Aidan Joyce, getting to the coalface of what’s causing 220 million users monthly to employ ad-blocking software.
“Ad-blocking has rapidly evolved as a consumer response to poor practice in advertising and the tools we offer today provide immediate results for publishers to render ad-blocking ineffective,” said Joyce.
“Our goal is to expand our content protection delivery platform to encapsulate more user-centric needs by fixing what’s wrong with advertising; namely speed of delivery, ad-choice, privacy concerns and safety for users.”
‘Silver lining’
Oriel’s stance is reflected in the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) proposal for online advertising; LEAN, an acronym for light, encrypted, ad-choice supported, non-invasive ads.
Like many in the industry, Joyce believes that ad blocking hasn’t necessarily been bad for advertising, arguing that ad tech has so far been developed with only the publisher in mind.
“I think we have a lot to thank ad-blocking for, and publishers & advertisers have a lot to hold themselves responsible for,” he commented to PerformanceIN.
“If we take LEAN and AdBlock Plus’s Acceptable Ads Initiative, somewhere out there is a reasonably happy position where we can maintain a fair value exchange between the consumer and the publisher.”
Founded in 2014, Oriel is a joint venture between Forsage Holdings & Tri-Ant Technologies. The group closed a €1 million seed fund investment in 2015.
A payment model will be ironed out within the next two months, although it’s likely it will consist of a monthly fee, with an additional charge per API call to present the messaging. However, its analytics offering should be available as a free service.