Ad blockers are easy to describe and hard to handle. A user flips a switch, ads disappear, and a publisher loses the revenue that funds their work. The difficult part is responding without turning your relationship with readers into a tug-of-war. Freestar Recovered came out of that tension and a practical frustration which I couldn’t ignore.
When “Recovered” Is a Number You Can’t Audit
At its heart, recovery is straightforward. If a user has an ad blocker running, they don’t see ads, which means the site can’t monetize in the usual way. A recovery experience shows a message that asks the user to disable the ad blocker so the publisher can serve ads normally. For this, Freestar was using a third-party recovery tool, and the value equation never felt clear enough to explain.
The problem was that the commercial terms were hard to reconcile with what we could measure. The vendor wanted to charge a fee based on what they “recovered,” and it was difficult to understand what they were counting. That ambiguity can affect publisher conversations. If you can’t walk a partner through the math, it becomes tricky to agree upon the billing. Over time, that becomes a tax on trust.
There was a second issue, too. The tool came with a long list of features, but many publishers didn’t need most of them. Paying for complexity can make sense when you use it, but it didn’t match how everyone was deploying the product.
Facilitating a Conversation Between the Publisher and the User
Most of us would assume that users simply close the request message and move on. But in practice, sometimes they will listen, and that changed how I framed the whole problem. The message details are more important than I expected. For instance, when the ask sounds like it came from the site the reader chose to visit, the exchange can feel reasonable. It’s a small shift in tone that can lead to a very different outcome. What’s more, if a user is given context about why ads are important to the publisher and they are respectful in their user experience, then many users will choose to support a publisher they like.
Once I started thinking of recovery as a conversation, a generic prompt felt like the wrong default. A publisher isn’t a template, and neither is its audience. The recovery message should reflect that reality. Publishers should be able to decide what they say, and how firm they want to be. One publisher might want a polite request and an easy exit. Another might decide the content isn’t viewable unless the ad blocker is disabled, and the prompt shouldn’t be dismissible without taking action.
Build It Where It Won’t Get Blocked
It’s not appropriate for us to dictate which approach is ‘right.’ That relationship is the publisher’s lifeblood, and it varies by audience, brand, and business model. What we can do is give publishers the controls, plus guidance on what tends to work, so the decision stays with the people who live with the consequences. However, there’s one aspect which I think stands firm.
There’s a technical irony to ad blocker recovery—a recovery tool can get blocked, too. If the recovery experience is delivered by third-party adtech, it can disappear right along with the ads. One of the choices we made was to host the recovery experience on the publisher’s site so that it can’t be blocked. It also helps the experience feel like part of the site.
Why We Made It Free
If recovery helps restore monetization, Freestar already benefits when more users are recovered. That puts us in a unique position. We don’t need a separate fee stream that publishers have to justify on top of everything else. What’s more, for a lot of publishers, that barrier to entry is the difference between testing something and ignoring it.
So we offer Freestar Recovered to our publishers for free. The goal is to remove an extra layer of cost and complexity, while giving publishers a tool that’s clean, practical, and easy to explain. It also means publishers don’t feel like they are paying for features they don’t use.
The Product Worth Repeating
Rather than make a shiny replacement for what a vendor already sells, we built Freestar Recovered to be based more on what we know our publishers need—something that holds up in a real stack. In a space where details are paramount, honest communication is a competitive advantage.
I also learned to be careful with assumptions about users. I assumed readers would always refuse a request to disable an ad blocker. But real-world behavior is more nuanced, especially when the message is transparent and feels like it came from the publisher.
Today, with Freestar Recovered, we can save publishers a staggering $3m per hour, resulting in an ROI of 6,399,873%. And with numbers like that, we’re confident offering it to all our publishers.
The process of building Freestar Recovered demonstrated a valuable lesson about building products for publishers, or for any business with a direct relationship to an end user, for that matter: Design the tool so it supports that relationship rather than talking over. When you do that, you solve a revenue problem without creating a new trust problem.
