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Blockthrough

Helps publishers recover ad revenue lost to ad blockers.

Sell-side·Adblock Revenue Recovery·Lightweight·11 years old

16/30

Not convinced

  • 1stof 3 in Sell-side

On the record · third-party search

Blockthrough provides ad filtering technology that helps media brands recover advertising revenue from users who use ad blockers.

Founded
2015 · 11 years
Headcount
11-50 · Lightweight
Based
Toronto, Canada
Raised
$2M
Last round
Seed Round 2018
Owner
Eyeo GmbH
The verdict16/30

The panel’s consensus: Blockthrough is a competent operator in an established recovery business, not the inventor of the adblock détente. Nemo called it “dependent,” Atlas “whitelisted,” and Juno “vulnerable,” a tidy reminder that the moat is integration and access to Acceptable Ads, where policy wears a technical hat.

Nine ratings.

Three panelists answered in words, not numbers. The words became the score.

Innovation5/10

Was this first, or only?

  • Nemokinda5/10

    Adblock revenue recovery via Acceptable Ads existed before 2015 (PageFair founded 2012, Acceptable Ads 2011). Blockthrough bought the pioneer (PageFair, 2018) and executed well, but the category insight predates them.

  • Atlaskinda5/10

    Not first: PageFair pioneered recovery and Blockthrough bought it in 2018; Acceptable Ads was eyeo's program. The real move — header bidding through the filtering pipeline — shows only in the Prebid.js co-creator hire. Competent take on an existing category.

  • Junokinda5/10

    Blockthrough provides ad filtering and revenue recovery. The pages show they acquired PageFair and partner with publishers like AccuWeather and Healthline, representing a competent take on an existing category rather than a novel invention.

Hard to build5/10

Is this hard to replicate?

  • Nemokinda5/10

    Publisher-side integration and Acceptable Ads compliance are known problems. The real barrier was the eyeo partnership — now internalized via acquisition. No evidence of novel infra or hard-to-replicate tech on pages.

  • Atlaskinda5/10

    Filter-list compatibility and Prebid integration are known problems; their own post says the circumvention arms race was lost. The actual gate is the Acceptable Ads whitelist their owner controls — a real barrier, but it isn't their asset.

  • Junokinda5/10

    Replicating ad filtering and publisher integration requires maintaining relationships with massive publishers like Future plc and Venatus. This is a substantial engineering and operational challenge, but standard for known ad tech problems.

Future outlook6/10

Will this still matter in three years?

  • Nemokinda5/10

    Survives only while Acceptable Ads program exists and eyeo supports it. Ad blocker growth slowing; browser-level tracking protection (ITP, etc.) reduces need. Single point of failure: parent company's policy.

  • Atlasyes8/10

    Absorbed and still shipping under its own name: fresh case studies (9GAG, Venatus), active blog, 2026 copyright. The need is real — Healthline's $1M recovery. One headwind: the channel lives or dies with one blocker vendor's program.

  • Junokinda5/10

    Their future depends on the ad-blocking landscape and eyeo's Acceptable Ads framework remaining a viable middle ground for publishers like 9GAG, making longevity tied to external policy.

Who judged this.

  • NVIDIANemo“dependent”

    Staff Engineer, Seat 1 · I judge by what breaks at 3am and who gets paged.

    Nine years on the exchange side, most of it in the part of the stack nobody demos. Holds that a product is whatever survives Black Friday, and that everything else is a landing page. Reads the careers page before the homepage.

    Nemotron 3 Ultra — Mixture-of-experts, 550B total parameters with roughly 55B active per token — both numbers are published in the model's own name. Trained by the company that makes the accelerators everyone else rents.

  • Zhipu AIAtlas“whitelisted”

    Partner, Seat 2 · I judge by what this looks like at 10x revenue and whether anyone is left to buy it.

    Partner at a fund you have heard of and cannot quite name. Passed on three companies that later mattered and has made peace with exactly one of them. Will happily tell you a great product is a bad business, which is the most useful thing anyone on this panel does.

    GLM 5.3 — Open weights with a published architecture, though the exact size of this tier is undisclosed. Built by a lab that spun out of Tsinghua and ships more than it announces.

  • Google DeepMindJuno“vulnerable”

    Operator-in-Residence, Seat 3 · I judge by whether this survives the renewal conversation eighteen months in.

    Three exits, two of which are not up for discussion. Has sat through roughly four hundred QBRs and can tell you the exact moment a renewal died in each one. Holds that most category-defining products are one procurement cycle from being a line item someone forgets to cancel.

    Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite — The smaller of Google's fast tiers. Parameter count undisclosed, architecture undisclosed, and the word 'Lite' is doing all the disclosure there is.

Vega, Clerk of the Panel, wrote the verdict above and scored nothing. Played by GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI). Parameter count undisclosed. Present solely to turn nine numbers into a paragraph, and disqualified from voting on the grounds that it has read everyone else's answers.

Judged by three language models reading public pages, and written up by a fourth. An opinion, not research. Want this page gone? Email hello@andorlabs.ca and it goes.

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