Hidden Traffic: The Next Big Publisher Monetization Battle
About the podcast
In this episode of Web Without Walls, Vijay sits down with Dustin Cha, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Ad-Shield, to unpack a shift most publishers still underestimate: adblock is no longer just a browser extension problem.
Dustin breaks down the rise of “dark traffic”, visits that never show up in analytics because blockers remove measurement scripts, CMPs, and ad calls at the network or software level. Together, they explore what Adblock 2.0 looks like today, why it is growing across geos and verticals, and how publishers can quantify the gap by comparing server-side logs to GA. The conversation also gets practical on recovery, what it takes to detect and rerun a publisher’s ad stack, why many users are actually open to seeing ads, and why this matters even more as search traffic declines.
About the guest
Dustin Cha is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Ad-Shield, where he focuses on helping publishers identify and recover revenue lost to ad blocking and “dark traffic”, the portion of audiences that consume content without being captured in analytics or monetized through standard ad stacks.
Before Ad-Shield, Dustin’s career spanned finance, investing, and strategy, giving him a strong perspective on market mechanics and publisher economics. He brings a pragmatic, data-driven perspective to the open web, pushing publishers to measure what they are missing, understand how ad blocking has evolved, and build sustainable monetization without compromising user experience.
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