If you’re a food blogger using Journey (a lower-tier ad network by Mediavine), you may have noticed some pretty obtrusive ads showing inside your recipe card on mobile devices.

They show up in between ingredients and in between steps of your recipe, and when combined with the sticky banner and video ads, there are moments when someone scrolling may only see ads (no content!) while trying to make your recipes.

Here’s a real-life example of this happening:

Literally just ads and blank space filling the screen.

I don’t know about you, but to me, this is clearly a horrible user experience.

Unfortunately, there is no way to block these ads within the native Journey settings.

However, they do have a helpful support article with some custom HTML that can block ads within your recipe cards.

And you can use a plugin called “Code Snippets” to add this HTML to all of your posts in one easy step.

This will automatically block all ads from your recipe cards sitewide. Yay!

I’ll show you exactly how to do this in just a sec.

But first, let’s discuss why you’d want to remove ads from your recipe card in the first place.

Does removing ads from the recipe card improve the user experience?

Hands down, YES.

Honestly, I hated visiting my own website on a mobile device with the intrusive ads inside the recipe card.

I believe my users (and likely Google) disliked it too.

After enabling Journey, my traffic decreased ~18% over the following 3 months, even after reducing the ad density to the lowest setting.

After removing the ads from my recipe cards, my traffic has rebounded UP 14% in just the last two weeks.

I also regained my rankings and lost thumbnails on a post that was previously #2 in the recipe carousel before turning on ads.

Obviously, this is just a correlation, and I can’t prove causation or rule out the impacts of things like seasonal trends, but I do think the pattern is very interesting.

Will it impact my earnings?

Probably slightly.

I personally chose to decrease the ad density on my food blog to the lowest setting and block ads from my recipe cards.

But despite these changes, I’m still earning about a $30 RPM for relatively short blog posts, which I find great!

Would my RPMs be higher if I turned all the ads on full blast? Probably.

However, I believe the intrusive ads would have a greater negative impact, long-term, on my brand and organic search traffic.

Here’s how to remove Journey ads from your recipe card, step by step:

And here’s a video in case you prefer to watch:

1) Install the “Code Snippets” plugin

You can search for it within the WordPress plugin repository and quickly install it on your site for free:

2) Add a new snippet

Once you have the plugin installed, you should see a “Snippets” section in the left-hand sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.

Go to Snippets –> Add New

3) Click the “Content (HTML)” tab and paste the ad-blocking HTML code

This is the code you want to copy-paste into your HTML snippet:

<div id="ad-management-config-settings" data-blocklist-recipe="1"></div>

4) Name the snippet and select the option to display it in the footer

5) Describe the snippet and click “Save”

Adding a description is technically optional, but it helps you remember why you added the HTML to your site (so you don’t accidentally delete it.)

Once you click “Save,” the custom HTML will be auto-inserted into every post on your site, effectively blocking any ads from displaying inside your recipe card site-wide.