Display alternative content for blocked ads

revisited...

[Jon_King]

I know it's been discussed many times before but I thought to revisit the issue in the case of newer solutions. I am trying to display alternative content for blocked ads especially that FF puts an empty box the size of the missing image with a black border in place of AdBlocked ads... ack! ...right in the middle of content.

For me it would be fine to collapse to nothing or display an image in its place but I have been unsuccessful. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Travis]

I guess that in javascript, you can check the content of the div in which an ad is supposed to show, and if the content is empty, then you inject another HTML code inside.

[lucy24]

fwiw:

The fastest I ever disabled AdBlock was for a site that did this: In one of the boxes that would normally contain an ad, the site put up a polite bit of text about why they needed ad revenues. Not “TURN OFF YOUR ADBLOCKER OR WE WON’T SHOW YOU THE SITE”. Not a popup. Just an alternative use of space that had already been allocated, with modestly sized, non-intrusive text.

Is it safe to assume that what you’d really like is for readers to disable their ad blockers? If so, think about it.

As a reader, I am not bothered by empty space. After all, I know I’m using an ad blocker. (If the advertising is a full-width div,* then yes, it does disappear; there aren’t several scrolls of invisibility before the text returns. But in the more common case of a box with fixed width and height, there's a blank area against whatever the page background is.)

FF puts an empty box the size of the missing image with a black border in place of AdBlocked ads

Say what now? I use FF with ABP and I've never seen that.


* When I include the publisher's pre-1922 advertising in an ebook, I've had to learn that I cannot call the div something obvious like "adtext" or "pubads", or ABP will hide it. Oops.