CLBR #228: The Battle over Adblocking with PageFair’s Johnny Ryan

The Battle over Adblocking with PageFair’s Johnny Ryan

It is estimated that 26.3% of internet users will be using adblocking technology this year with a resulting loss in revenue in excess of $22 billion. See The Looming Battle Over Ad Blocking.

Dr Johnny Ryan (@johnnyryan) is Head of Ecosystem for PageFair where he works with global stakeholders to sustain the open Web beyond blocking. His previous roles include being Chief Innovation Officer of The Irish Times.

Dublin-based PageFair is the leader in ad block solutions for website publishers. PageFair Analytics is used by over 2000 publishers to measure their exposure to ad blocking. PageFair technology is used by many premium publishers to restore blocked ad inventory. PageFair Ads is a self-serve advertising platform that displays non-intrusive ad formats to ad block users.

2015 Ad Blocking Report – The Cost of Adblocking

Adblocking Goes Mobile – 2016 PageFair Mobile Report

Dr. Johnny Ryan

Johnny Ryan grew up in Dublin, Ireland, and was educated at University College Dublin and at the University of Cambridge, where he was an O’Reilly foundation scholar at Magdalene College. As a PhD scholar at the University of Cambridge he studied the spread of terrorist memes on the Web. He was supervised by MI5’s official historian, and his advisor was the former Director of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

His first book, Countering Militant Islamist Radicalisation On The Internet: A User Driven Strategy To Recover The Web, was based on his work as Senior Researcher at the Institute of International & European Affairs. Thebook was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the 28 member states of the European Union.

His second book “A History of the Internet and the Digital Future” is on the reading list at Harvard and Stanford.” Library Journal called the book “the best Western history of the Internet offered to date, but it is up to readers to connect the dots of where things may be headed.”

Ryan started his career as a designer, and returned to design thinking later as Executive Director of The Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. He was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge from 2011-14, and occasionally lectures at the Business School of University College Dublin.

His writing has appeared in NATO Review, Fortune, Business Week, Business Insider, Contagious, and Ars Technica.

From Wikipedia:

Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland. . . . The city has an urban area population of 1,345,402. The population of the Greater Dublin Area, as of 2011, was 1,801,040 people.

Founded as a Viking settlement, the Kingdom of Dublin became Ireland’s principal city following the Norman invasion. The city expanded rapidly from the 17th century and was briefly the second largest city in the British Empire before the Acts of Union in 1800. Following the partition of Ireland in 1922, Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, later renamed Ireland.

Dublin is administered by a City Council. The city is listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) as a global city, with a ranking of “Alpha-“, placing it among the top thirty cities in the world. It is a historical and contemporary centre for education, the arts, administration, economy and industry.