I *can* think of an alternative: Put the ads in a kind of sidebar. Either to the left, or to the right of the screen. That way, the advertisers can be happy, and we don’t have to scroll past the ads to get to our more important content :)

The drawback is: on mobiles, there is probably too little room to also allow for a sidebar.

No matter how you look at it, the matter is complicated. I wish I had a remedy… and the power to enforce it :)

I don’t use Protopage mobile either. But I know for mobile users (from experience) it can be an issue. Of course the alternative is to pay Protopage to have the ads removed. However, at $2.49, I am assuming that they presume they will make a similar amount from each person by displaying the ads. If they make less, which I suspect they will due to the number of users installing ad-blockers, then they are just causing frustration.

I agree about the ad not being seen if it is a widget below all other widgets, but there are two points to this,

- Not all of my pages fill an entire screen with widgets, so some of my tabs will still allow the ads to be seen. Its also very unlikely I will rearrange my widgets just to hide the advert off the bottom of the page.
- Does it really matter if I see the ad or not? Although it is an irritation, I’m hardly likely to click on it, regardless of where it appears on the page, so again Protopage will not earn money from me. I also suspect this will be the case for a lot of other regular users.

Now that’s weird. Just click the little “x” in either of the boxes, and you won’t see any more commercials for the entire session. Why would you leave, just because you have to click once?

Too bad, of all the start pages, Protopage was the one that appealed to me the most, but I guess I’m going to check out the other ones now in hope they don’t have banners.