A new initiative on ad blocking aims to have publishers, rather than platforms, take the lead.

WAN-Ifra and Digital Content Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association), major publishers and key industry representatives are cooperating to address the danger to their businesses posed by the rapid rise of ad blockers, whose products are now used by more than 200 million users world-wide.

The initiative aims to help publishers understand and address ad blocking - improving the overall advertising experience online, encouraging those who use ad blockers to abandon the services, and helping to create innovative forms of online advertising that provide an alternative to display ads.

Use of ad blockers in the US alone has risen 48 per cent in the past year, costing publishers billions of dollars in lost revenue globally, according to a report by Adobe and PageFair. While most ad blocking software is aimed at the desktop browser experience, Apple has just opened mobile Safari to ad-blocking plug-ins, leading to fears of a collapse of mobile display revenue as well.

"We need to articulate a proactive response to ad blocking, one that respects users and sustains media businesses," says WAN-Ifra chief executive Vincent Peyrègne. "Everybody suddenly has a lot more freedom, and this freedom includes the freedom of consumers to reject forms of digital advertising."

Jason Kint, chief executive of DCN, says consumer privacy and user experience haven't been given proper consideration: "Now consumers are speaking up with software. The industry needs to clean up the user experience and provide more transparency and controls for consumers. This is the first step in that journey."

WAN-Ifra and DCN are calling on publishers worldwide to participate in a 'Call to think' to formulate guiding principles to shape the experience that users enjoy on publishers' sites in the future. The initiative emerged from a recent meeting organised by WAN-Ifra and hosted in London by the Financial Times and the Economist. It included representatives from many of Europe's top media companies including Axel Springer (Germany), the BBC (UK), Daily Mail Group (UK), the Daily Telegraph (UK), the Guardian (UK), the Irish Times (Ireland), JP/Politiken (Denmark), Mediahuis Connect (Belgium), RCS Media Group (Italy), Ringier Group (Switzerland), Stampen Group (Sweden), and Vocento (Spain), as well as delegates from Digital Content Next (USA), IAB UK, Mozilla and PageFair (Ireland). The meeting was initiated by Dr Johnny Ryan, head of ecosystem at PageFair.

A second meeting will be held on October 5 in Hamburg during WAN-Ifra's World Publishing Expo. Publishers interested in joining the initiative should contact Ben Shaw, WAN-Ifra's director of global advisory, at ben.shaw@wan-ifra.org or Twitter @bdshaw.

Publishers can also voice their opinions through a short ad-blocking survey, linked here.

Publishers should start to address the issue by determining how much of their traffic is currently blocking advertising, which can be achieved simply with a custom event in Google Analytics, which can be found here.

Priorities of the new initiative are:

- To improve the overall ad experience for users without ad blockers, to help ensure they will not install them. "We need to actively engage our audiences about the link between advertising and quality journalism, and we must find better ways to giving readers better control over their ad experiences," says Ben Shaw;

- To find ways to encourage users with add blockers to agree to be served ads again. This might involve setting and adhering to standards for online advertising.

- To focus on other mobile-ready advertising opportunities that provide alternatives to display, such as branded content, in-stream ad formats, video and audio, and e-commerce.

The initiative follows an earlier project to help prevent data leakage through the unwanted transfer of data from publishers to third parties, often through the use of cookies associated with online advertising. These cookies contribute to the problems that lead to ad blocking - sites that are slow to load, resource intense and packed with tracking software.