Alexis Marcombe, chief operating officer of Le Figaro Media, said that the success of the operation went beyond expectation, with 5 percent of ad-blocker users electing to buy a €9.90 a month subscription without advertising.
 
The Figaro campaign targeted core readers who would regularly read more than one article. During the trial, the pages of the website would get progressively more blurred following additional click throughs from the same reader, until when the content was illegible at about the fourth visited page. Macomb is positive that Figaro will extend its campaign. 
 
The experience of Le Figaro derives from its joining the initiative of French online publishing trade body Geste, which convinced several major French newspapers to run a trial ad-blocker ban for a week. The campaign was structured to happen simultaneously on the platforms of the publishers involved, but leaving to the different site the choice on the remedies to enable.
 
The approaches spanned from the Figaro “progressive blurring” to the hardline selected by sport newspaper l’Equipe which made its content unreachable unless the site got whitelisted, to the Guardian-style message from Le Monde editor on the importance of advertising for the survival of quality journalism. 
 
According to IAB France almost 30% of desktop users in France have enabled an ad-blocker. The study shows that the great majority of these are aged between 16 and 24 (53%), and that the percentage decreases with age, but remains 20% for people over 60. IAB also says that nevertheless more than 60% of ad-blocker users are  disabling their ad-blocker to access certain content, or to sustain a cause.