Change what happens to sidebar items in mobile

[Michael Morris]

This question is similar to, but not quite the same as, some other questions. On our page, we intend to have ads in the sidebars: two on the left, two on the right. Right now, there is one in each sidebar. Our prospective advertisers don’t like the fact that ads essentially disappear on the mobile site. I know, they don’t actually disappear, they just get buried beneath tons of center section content. But most viewers won’t see them.

At the same time, we definitely don’t want the ads to appear above all of the center section content in mobile. Ideally, we’d like the ads to appear between the first post on the homepage and the older posts. Is such a thing possible?

Also, the ads look rather weird in mobile, being put in containers the same width as the center column. Not a very efficient use of space. I have no idea what the solution to this is. Maybe if the sidebars appeared side-by-side in parallel instead of sequentially. Since I’m not a web designer, I don’t know how doable any of this is.

For reference, the site is blog.apaonline.org.

Thank you!

[Tom]

Hi there,

I know it’s difficult to add content after specific posts – it’s do-able, but involves custom programming.

What if the ad displayed in the content of one of those posts?

You can have content only show up on mobile by wrapping it in the show-on-mobile class:

<div class="hide-on-desktop">
    This will only show on mobile
</div>

I’m not actually seeing many ads on the site, so it’s hard to comment on the second part of your question. Do you have a screenshot perhaps?

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Tom.

[Michael Morris]

Thanks so much for responding, Tom. There are two questions I have about the approach you suggest.

First, I would need to place each ad two times, right? Once in the sidebar (tagged somehow to only show in non-mobile) and in the body of a specific post (tagged to only show in mobile). Is this correct?

Second, I’d have to manually place each ad into each post I want them to appear in, correct? We want the ads to appear on every page of the blog, and new posts are added all of the time, so this approach seems rather difficult. It could also result in the ads displaying multiple times on the homepage, since more than one show on the homepage.

[Tom]

Correct and correct. Less than ideal really.

You can Google “insert ad into every nth post” and you’ll find some solutions, but they seem to all involve custom programming which is a pain.

I’m surprised there’s not a plugin that does this like Ad Inserter, there must be a reason stopping developers from adding it to their plugins.

[Kenneth]

Michael, what did you end up doing about this? I am having the exact same issue.

[Leo]

This topic is old. I’ve answered it here:
https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/mobile-friendly-version-of-site-that-still-shows-ads/#post-764438

[Author]

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