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Google's Funding Choices Has a Blindspot

Google's Funding Choices Has a Blindspot

It's not detecting many ad blockers.

Adblock Analyst
November 22, 2024

I've been testing Google's Funding Choices feature, and there's a blindspot publishers should know about. The blindspot is the equivalent to 35-60% of ad blocking traffic.

For those not familiar, Funding Choices is Google's solution inside Ad Manager and AdSense that lets publishers show messages to visitors using ad blockers. It’s what many call an “adblock wall”.

The idea is to either:

Ask nicely with a "soft wall" that visitors can dismiss
Force the issue with a "hard wall" that blocks content until the ad blocker is disabled

In theory, this gives publishers a fighting chance to recover revenue. In practice? It's failing spectacularly for a large segment of ad blocking users. In short: it gets blocked.

Many websites use this solution, and they believe it works for their entire ad blocking audience, so it’s an expensive problem going under the radar.

The Test

I wanted to see how Funding Choices actually performs across different ad blockers, so I tested it on MailOnline (one of the highest-profile sites using a hard wall implementation).

Here's what's supposed to happen: visitors with ad blockers see a message requiring them to disable their ad blocker to continue (see above), followed by instructions for how to whitelist the site (see below).

For visitors using Adblock Plus or AdBlock, that's exactly what happens. The wall appears, the instructions work, and publishers can recover that ad revenue.

But here's where it gets interesting.

The Blindspot

For visitors using uBlock Origin (the third ad blocker logo in the screen grab I shared above), the message never appears. uBlock Origin simply blocks the message itself, or it blocks the instructions to disable it.

This isn't just a quirk with one ad blocker, though. I tested multiple popular options:

AdBlock Unlimited (600k downloads) — doesn’t load
AdBlocker Ultimate (6.2m downloads) — doesn’t load
AdGuard (160m users) — doesn’t load
Ghostery (100m+ downloads) — doesn’t load
Brave (70m+ users) — doesn’t load
DuckDuck Go Browser (50m+ downloads) — doesn’t load
Pie (500k downloads) — doesn’t load
uBlock Origin Lite (1.1m downloads) — doesn’t load
Stands AdBlocker (2.2m downloads) — doesn’t load

Conclusion: many ad blockers prevent Funding Choices from loading. Why? Because many do not allow this interaction with their users under their own policies, unlike AdBlock and Adblock Plus. So, they actively try to block it just as they do all other ad block walls. To be clear: they are not 100% effective at blocking them all the time because ad block walls like Funding Choices try to work around it, but the net effect is material enough to create this blindspot.

To make matters worse, some of these same ad blockers also block on-site analytics such as Google Analytics and even some dedicated ad blocking analytics. This creates a perfect double-blindspot:

Publishers can't show messages to these users
Publishers can't even measure how many of these users they have

What This Means For Publishers

This is an expensive problem hiding in plain sight.

If publishers are relying solely upon Funding Choices, they're only seeing data from the most hospitable ad blockers. These include AdBlock and Adblock Plus, which actually allow the message to appear. The most aggressive blockers and the users who choose them remain completely invisible to publishers.

For context, many publishers I've spoken with are operating under the assumption that Adblock Plus and AdBlock are still the dominant players in the market. This is a misconception. That hasn't been true for years. They have less than 30% market share.

But, it’s also true they aren’t the only hospitable ad blockers that permit Funding Choices messages. Other extensions, apps, browsers, and network-level blockers permit them.

How big is this blindspot, then?

The severity of this problem depends heavily on audience demographics:

If the audience skews younger and more tech-savvy, expect that less than 50% of ad blocking visitors are seeing the Funding Choices message
If the audience is more mainstream, its may be reaching 50%+

Why? Because younger and more tech savvy audiences tend to use the more aggressive ad blockers that do not permit ad block walls like Funding Choices to load.

For a high-traffic publisher like the Daily Mail, this gap translates to millions in potential revenue that's not just being blocked — it's being blocked in a way that makes the publisher think their mitigation strategy is working better than it is.

The Bottom Line

Google's Funding Choices solution has a fundamental flaw: it only works on ad blockers that choose to let it work. The most effective and increasingly popular ad blockers simply bypass it entirely, and they do so invisibly

Publishers relying on it to recover ad revenue are only addressing a fraction of their ad blocking audience — in the range of 40-65%, depending upon demographics.