Dublin’s PageFair acquired by Canadian rival Blockthrough

19 Nov 2018

PageFair co-founder Sean Blanchfield. Image: PageFair

Combined business of PageFair and Blockthrough will help publishers to recover revenues lost to ad-blocking technology.

Sean Blanchfield’s PageFair has been acquired by a rival Canadian company called Blockthrough for an undisclosed sum.

Dublin-based PageFair’s technology is used by thousands of websites around the world to help publishers recover revenues lost to ad-blocking technology. Global ad-blocking was estimated by the company at costing the advertising ecosystem $42bn in 2017.

Blanchfield is an accomplished tech entrepreneur who previously founded Phorest with Ronan Perceval and Dylan Collins. He followed this up with games middleware player Demonware, which was acquired by Activision for $17m.

Founded in 2015 in Toronto, Blockthrough is an ad-block revenue recovery platform for publishers.

Never mind the blockers

Prior to its acquisition by Blockthrough, the Dublin company had raised around €3m from investors that include Frontline Ventures, Tribal.vc and Enterprise Ireland.

On its website, PageFair stated: “Together, the combined company is the clear leader in ad-block mitigation solutions, and will offer the industry’s highest-yielding ad-block revenue recovery solution from Blockthrough, combined with the ubiquitous PageFair analytics platform, plus market insights derived from data spanning a combined 10-plus years of experience, helping publishers tackle ad-blocking.”

PageFair said that its trusted ad-block analytics platform, which gives publishers real-time insights into how ad-blocking is affecting their business, will remain free of use and it will continue to publish its annual ad-block research report.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com