Your comments

hey greg, what was your way around this?

Nick,

Not sure if you're on Zen or Flex but on our flex site in the global-container-bottom-fullscreen region we have two ads defined one for small and one for extra small... if you open messenger-inquirer.com on a device with a screen width less than 600px or so (or a window) then you should see it. (not if you're trying to look at in in a window size the window first and then load the page.)

Couldn't you include script in your header along the lines of
[% if cms.url.path | contains('oldsection'); cms.system.redirect ('url': '/'); end; %]

If a file's not found the the 404 error page is going to be displayed which should use the same header includes... Only thing is I'm not sure in that case if the url.path would be the original url path or the path to the 404 page.
Doug,
Townnews wasn't offering any direct support of this at the time of my post and my client wasn't prepared to develop something custom so I didn't pursue it. I just revisited the links I posted and it appears google has made their part easier to implement. I may see what I can do on my dev site.
BTW I like the idea of offering metered or free access to ad supported sections of the site be being to turn that off if an adblocker is detected.
I just logged on to post my experience with the local school district and their network wide web-filter / ad blocker and saw this.
We had just switched to Flex and several people at the school district were complaining about missing images on our site.
I made a house call to the district admin building and saw the missing content first hand. In addition to the missing photos all ads served from google dfp were gone and our online circulars showed up as broken links.
Come to find out they block wishabi.com, googleadservice,com, googlesyndication.com as well as a multitude of other ad related sevices at the network gateway.

Its seems with wishabi being partially blocked it was causing issues with the code on the site which bled over to our images.
I got them to whitelist wishabi for staff (not students) and it cleared up the issue with the missing content. (for the staff)

ps let people insert line breaks <br />
Maybe a "there are unsaved edits to this asset. do you want to review them?" prompt when the asset is opened
cool but a "restore" of the asset needs to be something doable from within the UI. If a reporter is going to have to contact IT or a webeditor who's going to have to submit a ticket and wait on a response... it's not going to happen... they'll go back to typing their articles in word.
keep the last saved version in memory and check for modifications locally... if there are no changes there's no need to send data back and forth to the server...