[Ankhers]

It really isn't this simple, no. I remember a number of years ago someone tried to do this. Pardon the language, but the "product" was called "Fuck adblock" I believe. It was a piece of JS that you could include on your site that, if I remember correctly, tried to see if certain JS objects existed. If they did exist, you could disable aspects (or the whole thing) of your site. Very soon after, someone released "Fuck fuck adblock" that essentially disabled this piece of JS.

It was a cat and mouse game for a while, but ultimately, if you want to detect if someone is using adblock, you need to do it in JS. And then the ad blockers will just add that piece of JS to their block lists.

[oh_sigh]

Then you make it so the AdBlock checker is the one that actually loads/displays the content

[codetrotter]

Then people will reverse engineer the AdBlock checker and make the content load without ads

[oh_sigh]

Sure, but it's much easier to be on the defensive here rather than the offensive. And it implies your site is popular enough to warrant anyone reverse engineering it anyway.

Since the adblocker strats are necessarily public, you could even have a system to automatically monitor them and apply a set of composable tweaks which breaks the current public release.