Unfortunately, that’s not an option. I have widgets that show on some pages but not others. For example, I have a widget that appears in Area 2 for pages in the “Readers” category but not elsewhere. I set this through the Visibility option within the widget. (See bottom of https://dalecameronlowry.com/category/for-readers/ for example.)
Plus, I just prefer the look of thirds over halves, and the only way I’ve figured out to get that is to use three widget areas as opposed to two.
So for those non-Reader pages, I need a text widget with in Area 2 to prevent the placeholder widget from appearing, yes?
(What I would *really* like is to not have to do that, and then have it set so that, on pages where no footer widgets are visible, the whole footer section would disappear. But I’ve been using the workaround I have for a couple months and can live with it. )