游戏媒体 WiseGuyGaming 用爬虫检测测出 18% 读者拦截广告，改推原生内容与付费订阅

Ad blocking doesn’t just prevent publishers from earning revenue; it also creates blind spots in their audience analytics that can affect everything from monetization strategy to editorial coverage.

Gamers are very likely to use ad blockers, which has led to significant challenges for WiseGuyGaming, a video game-focused publication that launched last year.

Its co-founder and CEO, Mike Smith, launched the publication with his son Mikhail following previous stints handling audience data and monetization for HBO, Forbes and Hearst. After two-plus decades working at established media brands, he wanted to start his own, he told AdExchanger.

However, the elder Smith quickly realized that the audience he most wanted to reach – technologically sophisticated gamers – are disproportionately likely to use the most advanced ad blockers on the market. Those ad blockers made this audience largely invisible to existing analytics solutions, in addition to being unreachable with banner and video ads.

But, fortunately, high-end ad blockers mimic some of the same online behavior as bot traffic. So Smith worked with Don Marti, a consultant specializing in open-source software, digital privacy and ad tech, to repurpose the tools WiseGuyGaming was already using to identify bot crawlers to reveal its ad-blocking audience as well.

As a result, WiseGuyGaming found that about 18% of its audience used ad-blocking tech. Now it’s strategizing how to reach that audience in ways that can’t be blocked as easily as a web banner.

The proxy problem

In addition to the Google Analytics tools widely used by publishers, WiseGuyGaming also relies on another popular third-party audience analytics and bot filtration tool, FouAnalytics, to measure its audience.

It’s especially important for publishers to use multiple analytics solutions these days, Marti said, because an explosion in bot-crawling activity to support generative and agentic AI has made it harder to separate human site visitors from bots.

Plus, Marti said, there are now more services like Bright Data that turn consumer devices like cellphones and TVs into residential proxies for AI scraping and other bot activity.

Basically, if an app installed on a person’s TV partners with Bright Data, that person can opt in to allow their IP address to be used to mask bot behavior. In exchange, they get an ad-free experience when using the app or some other incentive.

These proxy services make it harder for publishers to weed out bots using traditional methods like blocking IP addresses associated with previous bot activity, Marti said. Proxy services can make a bot appear to be using a residential IP address, rather than one tied to a data center.

However, there are nuances in how bot crawlers work when they load a publisher page that can be exploited to detect them, Marti said.

For instance, he said, many crawlers are configured to scrape a website’s data before any third-party scripts – including ad tech and bot-blocking tech – are able to execute on the page.

“The crawling company has been told, ‘Go to this page and [extract] the content of the big table on that page as JSON,’” Marti said. “The crawler is smart enough to know that all the social widgets on the page, all the random third-party JavaScript, ads, analytics – it doesn’t need that for the mission it’s on.” The crawler’s headless browser often doesn’t even bother sending the network requests required for the third-party scripts to run, he said.

But, as it turns out, Marti added, ad blockers likewise prevent the browser from sending network requests to ping third-party scripts, including ad tech and analytics. Which means publishers can use more advanced bot-detection strategies to also reveal when a human site visitor is using an ad blocker.

Fighting proxies with proxies

When a user with an ad blocker arrives on the page, the ad blocker references lists of known third-party ad servers and domains associated with ad tech, then prevents network requests from pinging those servers and domains.

Two of the lists most widely used by ad blockers are called EasyList and EasyPrivacy, Marti said. The really dedicated ad blockers that serious gamers and tech heads use, such as uBlock Origin, use both EasyPrivacy and EasyList, he said.

EasyPrivacy has FouAnalytics on its list of domains to block, Marti said. “So anyone who’s running FouAnalytics normally is going to miss the EasyPrivacy users because the FouAnalytics script is blocked before it even has a chance to load.”

Marti and Smith’s solution was to set up two versions of FouAnalytics on the WiseGuyGaming site.

One version worked as normal, Marti said, loading on the site as third-party analytics JavaScript that would be blocked by EasyPrivacy-equipped ad blockers.

But the other version used a “proxy pass” – or a first-party URL – to obscure the third-party script, he said. “It’s on wiseguygaming.com, so it’s not going to show up on any of the filter lists. But it is proxied through to the same FouAnalytics server as the third-party script, so we’ve got the exact same script being served onto the page twice.”

WiseGuyGaming could then compare data between its two different FouAnalytics dashboards to see which users were blocking the FouAnalytics third-party script, but not blocking FouAnalytics when it was using the proxy pass.

And since both Google Analytics and FouAnalytics had already prefiltered out likely bots, WiseGuyGaming could conclude with reasonable certainty that the remaining 18% still blocking FouAnalytics as a third-party script were probably either invalid traffic that evaded the bot filter or humans using an ad blocker.

Reaching the unreachable

Once WiseGuyGaming nailed down that roughly 18% figure for its ad-blocking audience, it then had to come up with a new way to reach those users, since banner ads wouldn’t cut it.

WiseGuyGaming’s immediate solution was to produce more sponsored and native content, which ad blockers are not configured to recognize, Smith said.

Meanwhile, the site’s editorial team was able to analyze the ad-blocking audience’s traffic patterns to understand what content was resonating with them, Smith said. Which is helping the editors to publish more content that can bring in that highly technical audience the Smiths want to reach.

The solution did have one flaw, Marti noted. It required them to look at two different FouAnalytics dashboards in two different browser tabs to compare the ad-blocking and non-ad-blocking audiences.

But that’s a minor concern, since the solution has transformed WiseGuyGaming’s editorial and monetization strategies, Smith said.

“We set out first to get a very pure count of our audience,” he said. “We are now going to launch a paid subscription service and use email and push [notification] technology to reach the roughly 18% that we found.”