IAB is forming Ad Blocking Working Group and plans to distribute code that detects ad blockers
Ad Blocking - Unlike Fraud - Comes At The User's Behest — If ad blocking is war, long-tail publishers will likely be its earliest casualties. — “Ad blocking is a threat to the whole industry …
Context & Ripple Effects
Ad blocking has moved from nuisance to open conflict within weeks: blockers topped the App Store charts and some publishers began hiding content from readers using blockers earlier in September. The Verge's framing of the fight as a revenue war among Google, Apple, and Facebook with independent publishers as collateral damage explains why the IAB — the industry's own trade body rather than any single platform — is stepping in now.
The working group's plan to distribute ad-blocker-detection code gives publishers a shared technical baseline instead of every site building its own countermeasures, and prefigures both the IAB's follow-on program for lighter ad formats and the vendor market for blocking-circumvention tools that emerged over the next two years.
First-order effects
- Publishers gain standardized detection code they can run themselves, letting sites identify blocked traffic without each building bespoke scripts — an immediate lifeline for the long-tail publishers the description flags as the war's earliest casualties.
Second-order effects
- A commercial market for anti-blocking technology opens up around the IAB's lead — validated when startups like Admiral raise venture money for blocker-circumvention tools a year later.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad-hoc publisher countermeasures give way to coordinated industry standards — the path the Coalition for Better Ads took with Google, Microsoft, and major buyers coordinating on acceptable-ads rules by 2017.
The trend: Ad blocking is pushing the industry from scattered publisher fights toward trade-body and platform coalitions that define acceptable advertising collectively.