Ad-Shield co-founder and co-CEO Dustin Cha this week told ExchangeWire that between 60 and 80 percent of all ad-blocked web traffic now falls into a category his company calls dark traffic, meaning it is invisible to the analytics, consent tools, and ad stacks that publishers rely on to measure and monetize their audiences.

Cha appeared on ExchangeWire's "A Coffee With..." series, part of the outlet's MadTech Podcast, in an episode published July 1, 2026, and hosted by John Still, ExchangeWire's Head of Content. Over the course of a roughly 18-minute conversation recorded during an English breakfast tea, Cha laid out figures drawn from Ad-Shield's work with publishers and offered a rare, candid account of how the company shifted from building an ad blocker to defending publishers against one.

From ad-blocking tool to publisher defense

Cha did not start out trying to solve the dark traffic problem. He described a prior career on Wall Street, where he worked on mergers and acquisitions and investment analysis for public stocks, before pivoting toward building his own venture. The idea for what became Ad-Shield emerged from an open call for product ideas on a crowdsourcing platform roughly six to seven years ago, at a point when YouTube was expanding its advertising and users were voicing frustration over the disruption. "The number one feature and product that people asked for was an ad blocking tool," Cha said, describing the response to that early survey.

Your Feed Has a Viewability Problem

If nobody's reading it, did it ever really load? Add PPC Land as your preferred source in Google Search and actually see the stories that matter.

Fix My Sources

The company built an ad blocker that Cha described as effective and, in its early period, commercially successful, drawing what he called "a couple hundred thousand downloads in a few days." That early success came with a consequence the founders had not anticipated. Once they understood the scale of revenue loss the tool was inflicting on the publishers whose content the ad blocker's users were consuming, Cha said the team reversed course entirely, pivoting to the opposite side of the equation and building tools to help publishers instead. That reversal, following what Cha called "ups and downs," eventually produced the current version of Ad-Shield.

What dark traffic means in practice

Dark traffic, as Cha defined it during the interview, is a byproduct of what he termed next-generation ad blockers. Earlier-generation tools limited themselves to stripping out advertisements. The newer cohort goes further, blocking trackers and measurement tags alongside the ads themselves, which removes publishers' ability to see that the visit happened at all. "This is really infringing on some of the publishers' activities and, i.e., really the monetization efforts," Cha said, describing how the newest tools interfere with a site's core business functions rather than simply removing display units.

Ad-Shield's own data, according to Cha, puts total ad-blocked traffic somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of all web traffic. Within that already-substantial slice, the company's analysis finds that 60 to 80 percent qualifies as dark traffic under its definition: visits where analytics, consent banners, subscription prompts, and other non-advertising elements are also being suppressed, not just the ads. That range means the truly invisible segment of a publisher's audience, by Ad-Shield's estimate, could represent anywhere from roughly 6 to 24 percent of total site traffic, depending on where a given publisher falls within Cha's stated bands.

How the detection and recovery process works

Ad-Shield's product operates by detecting, in real time, whether a visitor's browser or network is attempting to block or remove ads and trackers on a publisher's site. Once that detection occurs, the tool works to protect the affected ad slots and re-render or re-run the publisher's existing ad stack so that the previously blocked inventory can still be filled and measured. Cha described the technology as having taken four to five years to develop to its current state, framing it as filling a gap that had not previously existed in the market.

The practical effect, according to Cha, is that publishers who believed their site was reaching a fixed number of visitors typically discover a meaningfully larger audience once dark traffic is accounted for. "We uncover anywhere from 10 to 30 additional users that are actually that have been coming to the website," Cha said, describing the audience uplift publishers see once the tool identifies and addresses previously invisible visits. He characterized this less as creating new audience and more as recognizing traffic that had been present all along but unaddressed by conventional measurement.

Network-level blocking outweighs individual choice

One of the more consequential points Cha raised concerns the source of dark traffic itself. Rather than framing ad blocking as primarily a matter of individual user preference, Cha said the majority of the phenomenon originates at the network level, beyond any single visitor's active decision. "Over 50% of the ad block traffic that we see, over 50% of the dark traffic, is actually being caused by the network level providers," Cha said, pointing to enterprise IT configurations and VPN services as the two largest contributors within that category.

The distinction matters because it changes where responsibility, and potential remediation, might sit. According to Cha, users connecting through a company network with security-driven ad-blocking rules, or through a VPN service that bundles ad and tracker blocking as a privacy feature, frequently have no awareness that their browsing is being filtered at all. "That means that users, the end users, necessarily didn't have a choice to block the ads," Cha said. "They don't necessarily understand the fact that they're blocking or removing the ads and they did not have a choice to block the ads."

This framing lines up with figures Ad-Shield has previously published elsewhere. The company's Dark Traffic Report, detailed on PPC Land in August 2025, found that 57 percent of dark traffic users had not actively chosen to block advertisements, and separately attributed 21 percent of dark traffic to network-level blocking and a further 38 percent to VPN services and mobile applications. That earlier research, based on analysis of more than 5 billion page views across Ad-Shield's publisher network, estimated the scale of dark traffic at 976 million global internet users as of 2025, up from 590 million in 2019, with a projection of 1.1 billion users by 2026.

The pressure publishers are already under

Cha situated the dark traffic problem within a wider set of pressures he sees facing the publishing industry. He pointed to the growth of AI tools, zero-click search behavior, and Google's Discover surface as forces pushing publishers to lean more heavily on their existing, returning audiences rather than relying on discovery through search. "More and more publishers have been trying to focus on their organic audience, the people that come back to their website because of the original content that they create," Cha said.

Host John Still connected that framing to a separate data point circulating on the day of the interview, referencing Press Gazette reporting on a decline in UK news publisher traffic during April, which Still characterized in the conversation as a roughly 10 percent drop across the board. Neither Cha nor Still cited a specific published report or named source for that particular figure during the exchange, and it functions in the conversation as context for the broader climate rather than as a claim Ad-Shield itself is making.

That climate of traffic pressure aligns with a broader pattern PPC Land has tracked across 2025 and into 2026. News publishers lost roughly half their Google web search traffic in two years, according to NewzDash analysis of more than 400 publishers, with Web Search referrals falling from 51 percent in 2023 to 27 percent by the fourth quarter of 2025 as Discover feed traffic climbed to account for the larger share of Google-originated visits. Separate Chartbeat data has shown that smaller publishers lost 60 percent of their search traffic over a comparable window, nearly three times the rate of decline recorded among larger publishers with stronger direct-audience relationships.

Cha described Ad-Shield's own growth trajectory as accelerating sharply as awareness of the traffic decline has spread. "We grew anywhere from 30 to 50 times last year," he said, attributing the pace of adoption partly to publishers recognizing they already possess an audience they simply cannot see or monetize under current tools. "Once we give them the tool to recapture the audience that they already had, it's an instant kind of the recapture of the audience," Cha said.

Bridging the education gap

A recurring theme in the conversation was the gap between how publishers perceive the scale of ad blocking and what Ad-Shield's data indicates the actual figures to be. Cha described working with what he called some of the largest publishers and media companies globally, and said a common pattern emerges once those organizations examine their own numbers closely. "People are finding out that there is a wide gap between what they thought the percentage of the app block traffic is versus what the actual app blocking traffic is," Cha said.

He characterized the process of convincing a publisher to act on that gap as involving a meaningful lead time, even after the scale of the issue becomes clear. "Once people actually implement either our solution or actually see the magnitude of the problem that they've been not seeing, I think that the people's been very quick to admit and actually kind of expand on this traffic that they've been not able to realize," Cha said, while noting that reaching the point of conviction, and action, still typically requires sustained explanation on Ad-Shield's part.

Where responsibility sits, according to Cha

Asked directly where responsibility for the growth of ad blocking lies, whether with publishers, advertisers, or some combination, Cha offered a structural explanation rather than assigning blame to any single actor. He described a cycle in which publishers under revenue pressure increase ad load to compensate for falling income, which in turn drives more visitors toward blocking tools, which further reduces monetizable traffic and restarts the cycle.

Breaking that pattern, in Cha's account, requires publishers and advertisers to jointly improve both content quality and the relevance of the advertising served against it. "As long as you can kind of do that and nail that kind of combination, I think there should be a less number of ads," Cha said, describing a scenario in which fewer, more relevant advertisements could sustain higher pricing and reduce the underlying incentive for visitors to seek out blocking tools in the first place.

Cha also returned to the network-level dimension of the problem when discussing responsibility, arguing that any durable solution needs to involve conversations with network-level providers and VPN services, not solely with individual users or ad-supported publishers. He raised data protection and security concerns as part of the reason some network-level blocking exists in the first place, suggesting the industry needs to address those underlying concerns directly rather than treating all blocking as a single undifferentiated behavior.

Most blocked users still expect to see ads

A figure Cha returned to more than once was the proportion of ad-blocking users who remain open to seeing advertising in principle. "Over half, I mean more so close to 80 percent of the users are actually open to seeing the ads," Cha said. "It's not that they're closed-minded that they want to see zero ads, rather they've been just sick and tired of too many ads." He distinguished that larger group from what he described as a smaller cohort who object to advertising as a matter of principle, regardless of format or frequency.

Cha extended that point into a broader argument about the value exchange underpinning the ad-supported internet, saying that most users, when surveyed directly or observed in venues like Reddit discussion threads, understand that digital advertising functions as the funding mechanism for the free content they consume. He described Ad-Shield's own mission in those terms, framing the company's goal as helping build what he called "an ads free, ad-supported web ecosystem," a formulation he used to describe an internet where advertising remains present but becomes less obtrusive and better targeted to what users are willing to tolerate.

Why this matters for advertising and publishing professionals

The interview surfaces a measurement problem that sits adjacent to, but distinct from, the search and AI-driven traffic declines that have dominated publisher discourse over the past two years. Where declining search referrals represent audience that never arrives, dark traffic represents audience that does arrive but cannot be seen, measured, or monetized by the tools publishers already have in place. Both problems compress the addressable inventory available to programmatic buyers, but they require different remedies: one is a discovery and distribution problem, the other is a measurement and technical detection problem.

The scale claims in this interview, drawn from Cha's characterization of Ad-Shield's data set rather than an independently published methodology document accompanying this specific appearance, should be read as consistent with, rather than identical to, the company's previously published Dark Traffic Report. The February 2025 -dated research behind that report, covered by PPC Land in August 2025, drew on more than 5 billion page views and included commentary from Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive, and Jason Cicchetti, General Counsel and Head of Exchange Quality at Index Exchange, both of whom described the fragmentation of ad-blocking causes as a genuine shift requiring new industry approaches rather than incremental adjustment to existing anti-adblock tooling.

For publishers specifically, the interview reinforces a point that has become increasingly central to industry conversation: traffic decline and traffic invisibility are not the same phenomenon, and conflating them risks under-investing in the measurement side of the problem. A publisher focused solely on search visibility and AI-driven referral loss could still be missing a substantial share of its existing, returning audience simply because that audience arrives through a blocked or filtered connection. Cha's insistence that over half of that blocking happens without the visitor's active intent adds a further wrinkle: publisher-facing messaging campaigns that ask visitors to "whitelist" a site, a common anti-adblock tactic for years, may simply never reach the portion of the audience whose blocking originates at the network or VPN level rather than through a manually installed browser extension.

Timeline

  • Approximately six to seven years ago: Ad-Shield's founding team builds an early ad-blocking tool following demand identified through a crowdsourcing platform survey, coinciding with YouTube's early advertising expansion.
  • Following the tool's early success: The founding team identifies the revenue harm the ad blocker causes publishers and pivots the company toward publisher-side monetization recovery tools.
  • Over the following four to five years: Ad-Shield develops its current detection and ad-stack recovery technology.
  • Within the past year of the interview: Ad-Shield reports growth of 30 to 50 times its prior scale, which Cha attributes to rising publisher awareness of traffic decline and dark traffic.
  • July 1, 2026: ExchangeWire publishes the "A Coffee With... Dustin Cha, Ad-Shield" episode of its MadTech Podcast, in which Cha discusses dark traffic measurement and monetization with host John Still.

Summary

Who: Dustin Cha, co-founder and co-CEO of Ad-Shield, interviewed by John Still, Head of Content at ExchangeWire, on the outlet's "A Coffee With..." series within its MadTech Podcast.

What: Cha discussed dark traffic, meaning web visits blocked or filtered in ways that prevent publishers from measuring or monetizing them, stating that 60 to 80 percent of ad-blocked traffic falls into this category and that over 50 percent of it originates from network-level settings and VPN services rather than active user choice.

When: The episode was published on July 1, 2026.

Where: The interview took place in an ExchangeWire studio setting described in the episode as the "ExchangeWire Kitchen," and was distributed via ExchangeWire's YouTube channel and MadTech Podcast feed.

Why: The conversation matters to publishers and advertisers because it separates the problem of audience measurement invisibility from the more widely discussed problem of declining search and AI-driven referral traffic, and because it argues that a majority of the underlying blocking behavior happens without the end user's active awareness or consent, which affects how publishers might attempt to recover or communicate with that segment of their audience.