Computing e to 116,000 Places with a Personal Computer (1981)

I do.

As a kid, I'd go through those send-me-more info postcards in some magazines ("Computers & Electronics" was probably one) and circle the identifying number of every ad that I was interested. Which resulted in shelves and shelves of catalogs and brochures that I read through. Lots of neat new stuff that I wanted to know about.

(This eventually morphed into getting some wholesaler/distributor accounts, and their catalogs, for some of my childhood businesses.)

When I look at old magazine ads today, lots of neat old stuff that's interesting for different reasons than at that time.

For example, "They were already doing that back then?", "How much did that cost?", "How'd they do that that with tech of the day?", "I remember drooling over that prohibitively expensive, now-obsolete, thing, and I'm strangely still drawn to it.", "Now that I understand grownup things, so that's how these different brands were positioning".

Once Web ads started, in the mid-'90s, I was developed a Web-scraping application, and I went to a lot of trouble to preserve and present ads that came from where I scraped the info. Then ads secretly spying on people started becoming a thing, and it's hard to convey how offensive this was (surveillance of ordinary people was something done by evil geopolitical adversaries, of current and past history). So I started working on Internet privacy, and me -- the kid who loved ads -- ended up writing thousands of ad-blocking rules. https://www.neilvandyke.org/junkbuster/

As for appeal of ads today, I don't have a good intuition, because I know it's not just a display ad, I understand some of the business around it, I know that the Web site is selling out the privacy of its visitors and how that's abused, etc.

Back when everything I read was on paper, I disliked ads in newspapers and general-interest magazines but enjoyed them in specialist magazines. The high-budget ads aimed at large audiences seemed manipulative and were seldom for products I would ever want to buy. They also seemed to be a waste of paper and interfered with the reading experience. In contrast, the ads in, for example, guitar magazines or computer magazines were interesting, informative, and helpful to my purchasing decisions.

I occasionally see online ads that have been successfully targeted at my interests, but I never find them interesting in themselves, they are usually annoying, and only rarely do I click on them.

These magazine ads are for genuine products and signal-to-noise ratio is high.

Now, using Youtube as an example, the ads I see (in an account where I just listen to music or lectures):

  1. get rich quick schemes
  2. get fit quick schemes 
  3. pharma ads

Strongly agree.

The old ads were targeted based on the target audiences of the content. This makes sense intuitively, but it doesn't scale well from an ad agency's perspective.

The new ads are targeted based on the person viewing the content. It's cheap and easy, but it feels creepy. IMHO, a big part of that is the implicit message that people are always looking over your shoulder and taking notes.

There is something to the older ads, more effort went into them, however, I would venture that in this case, it's because the old ads are not ads to you, they're genuine curiosities in and of themselves.

I feel the same and agree with you.

I still have a physical newspaper subscription that I read. I like some ads. And some of those are very original and witty.

I also get a literary magazine that comes twice a month. There are lots of ads of books and other indie magazines which I make lists from, and regularly buy.

I am now in the process of subbing to local/indie type science/math/cs magazines to support and contribute articles to.

So, old kinds of ads do work.

I have a theory. I think there are three reasons.

1. There is the question of class. Ads in a literary magazine and a somewhat good quality newspaper know their audiences, and so do their advertisers, and the people they have for designing them. The internet ads are for every tom, harry, and dick. And hence they are less appealing to people of a certain level of class.

2. There is question of scale, of course. The designers of old kinds of ads design with a personality, an art. (Seen Mad Men?) While the ads in internet wants to scale. And I believe, data-driven decision making is the worst in terms of design/art. There should be art to these things.

3. Low barrier to entry is also a reason. To put an ad in a magazine like Byte or a national/provincial level newspaper, you need more money. And people who have more money are more likely to hire good designers/artists. And the internet ads have much smaller atomicity/granularity in terms of money. So anyone can put an ad. And these people will have less money, and will hire people who are lesser artists/designers.

Their are other minor factors like ads not covering your content or you not having to click to read your content.

Same for me.

I think in addition to the nostalgia, there is also the fact that the ads are not an infection vector nor do they rearrange the page in the middle of my reading the content.

Advertisements in women's magazines were far worse back in the day as there were so many of them it was actually hard to find the content...

I recall just ignoring ads when I read magazines, but now, when I go back, it's interesting to see just what was being advertised, and the price of items ($200 for 64K RAM! Cheap!).

Those ads were probably super expensive and companies with crappy products potentially weren’t able to sustain those back in the day.

Internet ads are a different story. Everyone can schedule them at really low costs.

E.g., imagine you had to front $5k in 1980 to get ur ad running in a magazine for 3 or so issues reaching maybe 100k readers versus spending $10 bucks to have then scheduled and shown today…

I share the same experience. It's not like we can no longer have those by the way, I've never been bothered by ads like Carbon Ads for instance. They're usually relevant (ads for code analysis tools or JetBrains IDEs on cppreference.com for instance), not animated and not obtrusive.

Even the cheapest electronics/computing ads nowadays taught me something. From memorizing electronic components codes to watch microcomputers slowly develop capabilities that only minis had. Ads where also window into an industry and hobby arms race.

Well a computer ad from 1981 is probably an interesting artifact in itself for a nerd interested in 1980s computing. I think that's all there is to it in this case.

Did anyone buy that instruction manual for the hovercraft made out of old vacuum cleaners? I remember that ad in computer magazines and maybe the boy scouts magazine.

Edit: this one https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/5upscu/the_hover...

For me, the hate of web ads started in earlier days. It was mainly that they are animated. How do I read a web when there is a flickering in the corner of my eye.

These days it's slightly different, the ads are interspersed within the content and often rotate to different ads after a delay, causing flickering effects. Also they take seconds to load so the text can move to.

Then there's the risk of malware ads.

The ads are harmless now. You may not have enjoyed them as much back then (but they were also easy to ignore)

There were a lot of ads in Byte. But as noted above, many were interesting in their own right. I certainly read many with interest back in the early/mid-eighties.

I have magazines for a not-terribly-popular 8-bit computer, the Tandy Color Computer, that regularly exceeded 200 pages, and that was one of about four magazines devoted to that computer. There was no Internet back in those days.