TechDaily News: +38% blended RPM and ad-block recovery in 6 months

TechDaily News is a Bengaluru-based tech publication with 14M monthly uniques across web + AMP. They run a content team of 22 and a single part-time ad-ops person. Before Adbris they ran AdSense + a single header bidding wrapper (Prebid.js, self-hosted) that nobody on the team could maintain.

Why they switched

Three reasons:

• The Prebid wrapper was 18 months stale and nobody on the engineering side wanted to own updates
• Ad-block traffic was 32% of their desktop audience (tech-savvy readers) and they had zero recovery
• AdSense's revenue was plateauing and they suspected they were leaving header-bidding lift on the table

The 30-day rollout

We started with their AMP traffic — lowest risk, easy to A/B since AMP is template-driven. AMP traffic moved fully to Adbris in week 1. After validating the lift, the canonical web traffic moved in week 3.

Ad-block recovery went live in week 4. We deliberately delayed it so the lift could be cleanly attributed to recovery vs the base header bidding swap.

The numbers

"We used to wake up on the 7th waiting for the AdSense email. Now we open the Adbris dashboard at 9am and see yesterday's numbers. The psychological change alone is worth the switch." — Rohan Iyer, COO

What worked, what didn't

What worked:

• Multi-MCM routing pushed their tech-skewed inventory to a partner with stronger B2B demand. CPMs lifted +27% on canonical pages
• Ad-block recovery added 9.4% incremental impressions. Net revenue impact: +6.1% (recovery impressions monetise at ~75% of baseline CPM, intentionally — they're served via constrained formats)
• AMP fill rate went from 71% to 94% because our partner's AMP demand was deeper than AdSense's

What didn't:

• Native ads in-feed didn't lift overall RPM the way we expected. Their in-feed unit competed with their newsletter signup module for attention. We disabled it after 2 weeks
• Anchored sticky units were rejected by their editorial team on UX grounds — they didn't want anything "permanently visible"

Where they are now

6 months in. Their monthly RPM is up 38% blended (web + AMP + mobile web). They've moved to Net-30 payouts from our default Net-45 (90+ days tenure threshold). The part-time ad-ops role got reassigned to audience development.