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Welcome

Welcome to the official Zero Ad Network documentation site. Here you will in depth information on what our platform is, how it works, and how to participate in our revenue sharing program.

Current State of Internet​

Zero Ad Network - Fair, Open and Trusted internet. We believe internet is a utility. Just like we pay for electricity, water, gas, and the internet service provider to stay online, we should be paying a monthly fee to experience websites without clutter and everyday annoyances.

Today such utility concept stops at us paying monthly bills to our ISP and mobile provider. We are paying for the access to various websites across the world, only indirectly. Website owners are getting their investments back by delivering ads and/or selling profiles about you to data brokers. This way they can justify the time, energy and financial resources spent to deliver value to you.

We believe this concept is broken. No one likes ads, popups, newsletter call-to-action dialogs or their personal and/or financial data to be sold to 3rd parties. Hence, we see a massive growth in popularity of ad blockers, DNS level blocker and more.

This creates at least 2 obvious problems.

Problem #1​

A significant decline in ad revenue for website owners and ad platforms reduces income and overall opportunities. This drives the search for new revenue streams or methods to counter ad blocking. The extent of user data being sold to third parties is reflected in the sheer number of cookie-consent dialogs now appearing on nearly every website due to EU internet regulations. This is just one example of sites seeking alternative approaches to recover lost revenue.

Examples

Global usage overview:

  • As of early 2024, about 31.5% of internet users worldwide (age 16–64) report using an ad-blocker at least sometimes [Source].
  • Another estimate puts the number of users at around 912 million globally (desktop + mobile) by Q2 2023 [Source].

Impact on publishers and "dark traffic":

  • On the revenue side: in 2024, ad-blocking was forecast to cost publishers roughly USD 54 billion globally — about 8% of total digital ad spend [Source].
  • A recent analysis by Ad‑Shield (2025) estimates 976 million "dark traffic" users—i.e. users invisible to standard analytics because their ad blockers prevent tracking — which further increases the scale of ad-blocking beyond what many publishers measure [Source].

Problem #2​

Everyone at this point knows that Google's main revenue stream is from ads. By controlling the most popular web browser puts them in a power position to heavily influence the direction of web standards. The introduction of Chrome's controversial Manifest V3 massively hindered ad blocker browser extension developers' ability to successfully disable ads.

The move towards DRM (Digital Rights Management) in the web standards will reduce ability to control what a user can or cannot choose to see even more.

Examples

Google's main tactics vs ad-blockers:

  • Under older Chrome extension architecture (Manifest V2), ad-blockers used the “webRequest API” to intercept and block network requests in real time. This gave them deep control — filtering dynamically, reacting to changing ad/tracker behavior [Source].
  • Manifest V3 replaces that with a more restrictive API, “declarativeNetRequest”, which forces ad-blockers to rely on static, pre-defined list of rules rather than analysis of live network flows [Source].
  • Because of the static filtering rule limits, restrictions on dynamic filtering, and slower updates — many ad-blocker developers describe the new environment as “crippled” compared to the flexibility of Manifest V2.

What is DRM on the web — and the standard behind it:

  • The main standard for DRM in browsers is Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a specification by W3C. EME defines a general API allowing web pages (JavaScript / HTML) to communicate with a “Content Decryption Module” (CDM), which handles decryption and enforcement of rights for DRM-protected media [Source].
  • EME deliberately does not define a specific DRM scheme itself: instead, it provides a standardized "bridge" so that proprietary DRM systems (CDMs) — such as Widevine (maintained by Google) — can be plugged in [Source].
  • Google (along with other big players like Microsoft, streaming services, and media companies) backed EME during its standardization process [Source].
  • On 18 September 2017, W3C formally published EME as a Recommendation, meaning EME became part of official web standards [Source].

The Solution​

If internet users expect to access ad-free sites it is fair that those sites could be monetarily incentivized to do so. Just like paying our internet bills, we should pay for ad-free content online too.

Zero Ad Network solves exactly this problem. We deliver tools and infrastructure that enables website owners and developer and internet users to trust each other.

Read our Monetization Guidelines to learn how monetization works on partner sites.