What is an ad wall (ad-gate)?

An ad wall is an interstitial page (or several) that a shortener shows before the real destination. It usually combines a countdown timer, banner and pop-up ads, and a button you can only click once the timer ends.

The goal is to keep you on the page long enough to load ads. The real link is there the whole time, the wall just delays it.

Ad walls are a way for a link's owner to earn money. The shortener pays the publisher for the time you spend and the ads you load, so it is in the publisher's interest to add as many steps as visitors will tolerate.

This is a business model, not a technical need. The link was ready from the start; the wall exists only to turn your visit into ad revenue.

Not all ad walls are equal. A light one is a single countdown and an ad, cleared in a few seconds. A heavy one stacks several ad pages, a 'get link' button, sometimes a captcha, and can take up to a minute.

Shorteners like adfoc.us and aylink sit at the light end, while linkvertise and the exe.io family sit at the heavy end. The destination is the same in both cases; only the amount of friction differs.

First a countdown runs while ads load. Then a 'continue' or 'get link' button appears. Often there is a second page that repeats the process, and sometimes a captcha to prove you are human.

Each step is another chance to show an ad. By the end you have spent twenty or thirty seconds and several clicks to reach a single address.

A resolver clears these steps for you and returns only the final destination. You see the same link without the ads or the wait, and nothing is installed on your device.

It is a convenience layer over a redirect the shortener already defines, not a hack; you simply reach the address the short link was always pointing to.