How Dennis Publishing convinced 71% of ad block users to compensate them for reading content

Prevailing solutions to address ad blocking have traditionally been limited to the provision of a single choice. Users of a website could be either asked to deactivate the ad blocker, or to pay for reading the content, or register to a website or even view ads delivered without consent.

At Sourcepoint, we always believed that such a black and white approach – with a singular choice – did not allow for the limitless variety of user interests, needs, or preferences. This prompted us to ask the question, What would happen if multiple options existed for users to compensate content providers?

To answer this question, we launched a 6-month project with one of the UK’s leading premium publishers, Dennis. The project covered four of Dennis’ digital properties, one of which was The Week (theweek.co.uk), a current affairs brand with around 5m users each month.

The Week’s online audience included in the test was split into four user groups, each representing a 10% slice of desktop and mobile traffic. Ad block users in each group were shown a specific message and call to action before letting them access the website’s content.

The goal was to evaluate engagement with a variety of messages and preferred compensation choices among ad block users. Dennis leveraged the Sourcepoint Dialogue™ platform to facilitate such segmentation and ensure that the groups did not include users that were previously exposed to ad block messages and were not part of any other test The Week ran at that time.

Read the full case study.