For example, when they visit, there are no interstitial pages, boxes covering the page when a user mouses out of the viewport, autoplaying audio/video, or any of that other obscene nonsense.

paulddraper is pointing out that if the user has an adblocker, they will never notice whether your ads are intrusive or not.

There is no chance to recover a user after they install an adblocker.

After they install an ad-blocker anywhere. The site in question could always been been nice and unobtrusive with their ads. It makes no difference for most users.

Unless you stop using ad networks and just inline unobtrusive text ads?

This is a trap. If you make your ads content-like, and integrate them into your content, then people will say your site is deceptive, hiding ads in content so people read them like factual articles.

You don't need to make them content-like. Have ad sections that are just text. I can't recall the name of the site but that one Mac-related site that does text ads seems to be doing pretty well at it. Please if someone does know the site I mean let me know it's on the tip of my tongue!

The inventor of markdown. Fireball something. But it's really an exception.

Daring Fireball, that's the one! Of course it's an exception - no other bugger tries, opting to instead chuck adsense all over the place.

John uses Deck[0] for Daring Fireball

0: http://decknetwork.net/

Didn't realise there were also adverts on the site. I was more talking about the feed sponsorship

http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Deck is the only decent ad network I'm aware of, so I keep them unblocked. The fact that you haven't noticed he has ads on the site speaks enough.

I'm not a mac user so I only ever visit the site when I double check he's still doing the sponsored feed thing before using the site as an example of non-ad income.

Unfortunately however I didn't notice it as uBlock Origin had blocked it.

I find his podcast relaxing (well, most of the time) to listen to even though I'm not a Mac user either. I think he mentioned Deck a couple of times, so I turned uBlock off to see, and hey, they really are reasonable and tasteful, so I left it open for them. They're not getting almost anything from me since I very rarely visit sites in their network, but I leave them on on principle. I don't mind ads, I mind being digitally and visually raped.

I haven't once seen an attempt by any site to show me a "this is what our ads would look like - we're clean, honest!" element when they detect I'm blocking.

My adblock policy (the same one I use on all friend & family systems) is extremely strict. I'm not going to whitelist your site, or any site for that matter, just to see if your ads are "safe". Your options are to show me they are DESPITE my blocking for a chance at an unblock, or prevent me from viewing your site altogether.