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There are a very few sites where I haven't minded the ads.

Chief among them was Ravelry, a social site for knitters and crocheters. At least as of the last time I used the site (which was admittedly years and years ago) they just one banner ad at the top of every page, hosted first-party rather than through an ad network.

The ads were far better targeted than anything I've ever seen come out of an ad network, because they were typically relevant to my interests, and also generally caught me at a time when I was already thinking about buying something like what the ad was trying to sell. Admittedly, it was an easy job that could be done with only a light application of tensor algebra, but still. I clicked on those ads. Often. And I always at least glanced at them. It was a lot like what you were describing with magazine ads.

The thing that gets me about modern Internet ads is that I really don't think they're the spiritual successors to magazine and newspaper ads, not even when they're hosted on magazine and newspaper websites. They're more comparable, in all but the most cosmetic of ways, to junk mail and telemarketing.

You should check out the "flow" to place an ad on Ravelry. I looked into placing a ad for my woodworking stuff and figured my ad would not get approved so I stopped. As a person that generally hates ads I am alright with this. I make stuff out of wood, they like yarn and don't want my ad and I am cool with that.

It’s to do with editorial. Annoying ads in print media simply won’t be run if they compromise the content (as a rule, there are of course exceptions).

Typically web doesnt have the same kind of control and advertisers have more or less free rein to do what they want.

Not to mention that platforms are having a free rein over gathering sensitive information and turning it over to advertisers so that they can 'target' people as they please ...

This suggests that there's a huge void in the market for websites and magazines who would go the length to curate their advertisements to make them relevant and not annoying.

there is, but the push for the network-based advertising is too strong, because in addition to mere advertising it also delivers market insight, which is arguably more valuable

I tend to agree with you, but for me personally I think the difference comes down to intent.

When I open a magazine, even if I have a specific article in mind I want to read, I will slowly turn through the pages happy to browse through other random content. It is a very leisurely, less focused interaction.

When I go to a website it is almost always for a very specific purpose. My mindset is goal oriented - I want exactly the content I came here for, nothing more (with rare exception, like HN). And probably years of navigating through horrible websites has helped shape that mindset in me, but I have to wonder, if websites delivered curated content and ads at the level of a magazine, would I even care?

I thought of the same but realised that I have contradicting examples from myself alone.

I sometimes go to a magazine to read about something specific yet I might eyeball the ads while I'm around the target content. If it's a long multi-page article that I'm interested in specifically, or a single page thing, I still might pop out of the text into an advertisement occasionally.

Conversely I do browsing (in the traditional sense) on the web as well: I often find myself looking around some website, reading this and that around here and there, trying to figure out how much of the stuff is interesting vs boring, and generally not diving deep on anything and thus I'm theoretically quite open to subject myself to advertising but I still don't look at ads, and I'm still not interested.

I sometimes wonder how would it be if web had started with good ads and I had conditioned myself from the start to expect interesting stuff in the ads.

It's just that the web went the opposite way, innocently starting with a <blink>, and going to JavaScript, Flash, and cookie-infested ad networks and whatnot to deliver involuntary injections of striking advertisements, and now I'm practically allergic to anything that moves or stands out.

> Advertisements in magazines are often somewhat interesting, well-made to be entertaining, or even useful. I used to read ads in magazines and I still sometimes do.

"Believe it or not!" but magazines like Creative Computing, Compute!, BYTE, Run, and other 1980's PC magazines used to be all about the ads. There was often no other way of knowing what new software or hardware was available to buy, especially for smaller companies. You would open these magazines up, and look at the ads, each ad had copy that was either inspiring enough to dream about or cryptic enough to try to envision how it was being done. You were going to buy the magazine anyway so it didn't really matter if the articles were good. A good issue was one that had both. Rarely did you find the stock photo inanity that is beautiful people in a boardroom, all super interested at a whiteboard with arrows that go up, up, up.

I used to like (and click) ads from The Deck[1]. They were simple and usually for interesting things related to the sites that hosted them.

I also don't mind the ones on readthedocs-hosted content[2].

It's probably worth noting that neither of those are/were blocked by privacy badger, which I use on my desktop instead of an ad blocker.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/r-i-p-the-deck/

[2]: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advertising/ethical-ad...

Daring Fireball’s sponsor placement isn’t blocked by Safari or by 1Blocker X

https://daringfireball.net/

I’ve purchased SaaS from his use of Deck in the past, or learned of and purchased deals from that placement this past year.

> Advertisements in magazines are often somewhat interesting, well-made to be entertaining, or even useful.

Really? I find them interrupting, manipulative, and vapid, as a general rule. If my magazine was "boring without them", I'd need to find a different magazine. Ads are at best blockers to the content I wanted to get, and at worst manipulative and deceptive, be that in print or on screen. (Note: There are always exceptions - ads that are entertaining, be that in print, on screen, or on TV, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule for me, and something I'd happily sacrifice to have ad-free content)

Different strokes, I suppose.

What about youtube ads, do you consider them pretty bad too?

Personally I think they are the most tolerable. There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.

Contrast this with web page ads that obscure the entire content until you find a tiny x in the corner to close them or worse require you to click some stupid button to disappear. With websites that display the content, but then obscure it within a split second I realised a pretty quick way to get rid of them is to right click on the ad/element-> Inspect in Chrome then hit delete removing DOM elements that obscure the main content until you can see the content.

For me personally, I find Youtube ads tied with peak annoyance. Ads which jarringly interrupt my audio, like Youtube ads inevitably do, are the worst.

Usually, audio ads are an ignore-able abomination, fortunately my audio is muted most of the time. However, if I'm watching a Youtube video, then my audio is almost certainly NOT muted, hence the terribleness of the ads.

Often an ad interrupting whatever content I'm watching on Youtube is enough to make me reconsider whether it's worth bothering finishing the actual video.

> There isn't that many of them displayed for me (maybe one ad per 3-4 10-15min videos). One can skip it after 5s and around half the time those ads are fairly well matched.

How many ads you see highly varies by person. Recalling Tom Scot's explanation that I fail to find, imagine when you play a video an auction is going where advertisers bid to buy your time from Google and winner shows you an ad, but Google also sets a minimum bid, so you don't see ads if nobody bids that minimum.

YouTube are the worst. With TV they find a break to pause for messages - it might be a cliff hanger, to ensure I don't go away, but at least it is a pause. YouTube breaks in right in randomly in the middle of a sentence which means it is difficult to follow the thought across the ad break. (YouTube breaks in at deterministic times, but they have no relation to the program so it counts as random)

YouTube could have good ads but their interface is horrible.

The ad interrupts the video, and I don't just mean it cuts in the middle of something. The problem is two timelines, the video and the ad. The ads make jumping around difficult because you switch between these timelines. Sometimes you always trigger an ad at around the same point. And you can't forward over the ads so if you're jumping forward and backward in the video, looking for something, the whole experience is choppy.

Obviously, the video creator could be asked to set N points in the video where ads would fit more naturally. Maybe they already do this, I don't know, but definitely a lot or most of video creators don't use that feature.

YouTube ads might be all right if they were just part of the video timeline, just like a tv episode with ads recorded on VHS.

I might not bother to j/l and left/right over short ads but watch them instead. And if I were seeking back and forth looking for interesting bits of the video I would spend time seeking back and forth over the ads as well which would be a point of contact to make me stop for a while and finish watching the ad too, if it seemed good.

Magazine ads don't force me to watch them for 5 seconds either, and they're worth paying money for. YouTube could very well do the same and I'd welcome a more streamlined, linear watching experience instead.

Sometimes video ads can get my attention in a good way, they have to just be really well made. I remember scrolling through an Instagram ad that looked like a "safe suburban" style video. I almost dismissed it when a weird glitch effect began the transition into a Borderlands 3 advertisement. The dog in the backyard was suddenly a mutated feral dog, and his owner was a wasteland junkyard rat. I thought, "damn, I wish every ad was this good. Then I wouldn't hate them so much."

You're right, but this is not always true. I saw magazines where the actual content was 1/8 of it or even less (this is usually common with magazines that you see in waiting rooms, I guess it kind of makes sense :). At that point the experience is not great, or at least I hated it.

The content is the ads, it’s the “shopping experience” in paper form.

One model where I sometimes found the ads interesting was the old Kuro5hin. You had to be a site member to buy ads, so they were usually from someone you recognized as part of the community, and usually somewhat relevant to the community.

you aren,t in control either in web or in paper. the only differnce in my opinion is that they track your view to other viewes..

I am in perfect control of my reading experience when I have a magazine in my hand. I can either look at the ads or skip them, or I can just glance at one and decide which way to go.

This is in contrast to web where I'll have to start by choosing a set of ad-blocking plugins to allow me back even some of that control even before I've read a single article online.

I don't particularly even care that much about ad networks tracking me, that's more like a philosophical / ethical question that is invisible in the daily life. Web ads aren't bad because of tracking, it's just that they're mostly bad ads.