Blockthrough, which helps online publishers recoup advertising dollars from ad blockers, on Thursday announced the acquisition of PageFair, an analytics technology that measures more than 12 billion page views per month.

The idea is to combine Blockthrough’s ad-blocking recovery technology with PageFair’s adblock analytics platform.

Marty Kratky-Katz, Blockthrough founder and CEO, will lead the combined company. Sean Blanchfield, PageFair cofounder and CEO, will stay on for at least three months to advise the management team. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Kratky-Katz said Blockthrough, a thirteen-person company, acquired PageFair for its reputation in ad-blocking analytics, brand value through search engine optimization and links, and at least four patents.

The patents range from an anti-tampering server to a web advertising protection system.

“In the next six months I think we can double our revenue based on this acquisition,” he said.

Kratky-Katz would not disclose Blockthrough’s annual revenue, but did say the company helped publishers recover $1 million in advertising revenue so far in November.

“I believe we can increase revenue by a factor of five to 10-times, from 2018 to 2019,” he said.  

For online publishers, recovering from ad blocking has been challenging. When someone uses ad-blocking technology, the original ad call to the exchanges and advertising networks never happen. “When you’re a publisher and have 10% to 20% ad impressions to sell, you’re revenue goes up,” Kratky-Katz said.

Three-year-old Blockthrough originally set out to build technology to deliver an ad-blocking experience that would not require people to whitelist sites or turn off ad blockers when they wanted to see ads.

It was a little more difficult than engineers thought, Kratky-Katz said. “We launched three iterations of the product focused on circumventing the ad blocker,” he said. “We found a lot of problems with that approach.”  

So Blockthrough began to focus on the Acceptable Ads standard, a nonintrusive ad format that doesn’t interrupt a reader’s natural flow.