Ad Tech Vet Ben Barokas Launches Sourcepoint to Block Ad Blockers
Peter Kafka / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
Sourcepoint arrives just as ad blocking stops being a niche annoyance: months after this launch, blockers topped the App Store and publishers began hiding content from people using blockers. Ben Barokas, an ad tech veteran, is betting publishers will pay for a countermeasure rather than cede the audience.
First-order effects
- Publishers get a new line of defense — software that detects and blocks the blockers — aimed squarely at recovering revenue lost to blocked ads.
- Blocker makers now face a direct adversary whose entire business is neutralizing them, turning a one-sided tool into a two-sided arms race.
Second-order effects
- The countermeasure market formalizes: a year later Admiral raised $2.5M on the same premise of tools that circumvent ad-blockers, showing Sourcepoint validated a category rather than occupying it alone.
- As blocking and unblocking escalate, publishers weigh exits like shifting toward native advertising and publishing directly inside social platforms, where ad blockers have less reach.
Third-order effects
- The arms race has no stable endpoint — by 2017 Stanford and Princeton researchers demonstrated a computer-vision-based blocker designed to evade all known anti-ad-blockers, suggesting each defense layer invites a detection workaround.
- If evasion keeps outpacing enforcement, the structural pressure pushes publishing away from open-web display ads entirely, toward walled platforms and native formats where blocking is structurally harder.
The trend: Open-web advertising is entering an escalating blocker-versus-unblocker arms race that steadily shifts publisher economics toward platform-native distribution.