Gaming Site Turned Bot-Detection Tech to Find Its 18% Ad-Blocking Audience

Roughly 18% of WiseGuyGaming's audience uses ad blockers — and the publisher only found them by repurposing its bot-detection tools. The video game publication, launched last year by Mike Smith and his son Mikhail, discovered that its core readership of technologically sophisticated gamers was both unreachable by banner ads and invisible to standard analytics.

Mike Smith, co-founder and CEO, spent more than two decades handling audience data and monetization at HBO, Forbes and Hearst before starting his own brand, he told AdExchanger. He quickly hit a problem his big-media career had not prepared him for: the audience he most wanted was disproportionately likely to run the most advanced ad blockers on the market.

How did a publisher detect ad blockers?

The breakthrough came from an unlikely parallel. High-end ad blockers mimic some of the same online behavior as bot traffic, according to Don Marti, a consultant in open-source software, digital privacy and ad tech who worked with Smith on the fix.

Both block the network requests that third-party scripts — ad tech and analytics — need to run. Marti explained that many crawlers scrape page content before third-party scripts execute at all. "The crawling company has been told, 'Go to this page and [extract] the content of the big table on that page as JSON,'" Marti said. "The crawler is smart enough to know that all the social widgets on the page, all the random third-party JavaScript, ads, analytics – it doesn't need that for the mission it's on."

Ad blockers behave the same way, blocking pings to known ad tech domains. That overlap let WiseGuyGaming use advanced bot-detection strategies to flag humans running ad blockers — not just bots.

Why is bot detection getting harder anyway?

Marti said an explosion in bot-crawling activity supporting generative and agentic AI has made separating humans from bots harder for all publishers. He also pointed to services like Bright Data, which turn consumer devices — cellphones, TVs — into residential proxies for AI scraping. Consumers opt in, lending their IP address to mask bot behavior in exchange for an ad-free app experience or another incentive.

That makes traditional defenses, such as blocking IP addresses tied to past bot activity, less effective. A proxied bot can appear to use a residential IP rather than a data-center one. Multiple analytics solutions are now essential for publishers, Marti said — WiseGuyGaming runs Google Analytics alongside FouAnalytics, a third-party audience analytics and bot-filtration tool.

What was the two-dashboard trick?

There was a catch. EasyPrivacy — one of the two filter lists (alongside EasyList) used by serious ad blockers like uBlock Origin — includes FouAnalytics on its block list. "So anyone who's running FouAnalytics normally is going to miss the EasyPrivacy users because the FouAnalytics script is blocked before it even has a chance to load," Marti said.

The solution: run FouAnalytics twice. One version loaded as ordinary third-party JavaScript and got blocked. The other used a "proxy pass" — a first-party URL on wiseguygaming.com that serves the identical script. "It's on wiseguygaming.com, so it's not going to show up on any of the filter lists," Marti said. "But it is proxied through to the same FouAnalytics server as the third-party script, so we've got the exact same script being served onto the page twice."

Comparing the two dashboards revealed who blocked the third-party script but not the first-party one. Since both Google Analytics and FouAnalytics had already filtered likely bots, the remaining 18% were probably invalid traffic that evaded filters or humans using ad blockers. The method's one flaw, Marti noted: the comparison required two dashboards in two browser tabs.

What changes for the business?

WiseGuyGaming responded on two fronts. It produces more sponsored and native content, which ad blockers are not configured to recognize, Smith said. And its editors analyzed the ad-blocking audience's traffic patterns to learn what content resonates with that highly technical readership.

"We set out first to get a very pure count of our audience," Smith said. "We are now going to launch a paid subscription service and use email and push [notification] technology to reach the roughly 18% that we found."

The technique is replicable for any publisher with bot-filtration tooling — though it measures the problem rather than solving it, and the subscription push will test whether that 18% will pay for what ads cannot reach.