Patricio Robles says, “Researchers at Princeton and Stanford University have created a super ad blocker that could deliver a devastating blow to the efforts of publishers and advertisers to block the now widely-used ad blockers.

Here’s what publishers and advertisers need to know about it.

1. It uses “perceptual ad blocking”

Most ad blockers in use today look for the footprints of digital ads. For example, they scan the contents of a page, identifying snippets of code and URLs that are commonly associated with ads and ad networks. This approach is very effective at blocking ads served by major ad players like Google, but it’s far less effective at weeding out ads that are served by publishers themselves, including native ads.

The university researchers’ ad blocker uses computer vision technology to analyze the contents of a web page much the same way a human would. As Vice’s Jason Koebler explained…

…it uses optical character recognition, design techniques, and container searches (the boxes that ads are commonly put in on a page) to detect words like “sponsored” or “close ad” that are required to appear on every ad”.

What publishers and advertisers need to know about Princeton and Stanford’s new super ad blocker

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