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> Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads

I think you might be looking at this situation through rose-colored glasses. When I was a kid in the 2000s, I loved reading PopSci and I distinctly remember at least 30-40% of it being ads throughout most of the magazine. And then, the last 20+ pages were all ads.

Looking even further back, I've had to do some research on 90s vintage computers lately, and every edition of PCMag I've dug through has been laden with ads. It's even more packed with ads than I remember PopSci being 10-15 years later.

Maybe it wasn't mostly ads, but it wasn't far off.

What has changed is the annoyances ads cause. Online ads load slowly, screw with the layout while you're reading, and are overall much more disruptive to the reading experience than a print ad could ever be.

Yep. And the ads were often good. I read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics growing up. The ads weren't just some bland spec sheet, they went into the technology or engineering behind whatever it was advertising. The ads could be as good as the articles. Simpler ads would at least try to be clever.

I do recall a handful of the full-page PopSci "back of the mag" ads being articles in their own right, and sometimes they were as well-written as the actual articles written by PopSci. Although those were always the exception, rather than the norm, I feel like that kind of thing is just gone.

That said, I wonder if it's caused by limits in the ad delivery methods we use today, rather than some industry wide lack of interest in making quality ads. I can't conceive of how such an ad would be delivered through Google, for example. Meta? Maybe.

There are a lot of people here who react viscerally to any advertising in any form. I'd point that Computer Shopper was a huge magazine with some pro-forma often low-rent writing that existed as basically a vehicle to deliver ads to people who couldn't really get that information any other way. PC Mag/Byte/etc. was higher quality editorial but still had a lot of advertising.

Indeed. As I recall Computer Shopper's articles were the legally minimum percentage of the magazine to make it qualify as a periodical rather than a catalog (US postage rates between the two differed, with periodicals being cheaper). We subscribed for the ads, but some of the articles (like Don Lancaster teaching writing Postscript manually to create figures) were interesting.

You take what you can as a freelancer and I'm sure I know a number of folks who wrote for a the magazine at some point or other and did a fine job. But you certainly didn't subscribe or buy issues for the articles.

Magazine ads don't bother me, especially if they're on-topic (e.g. PC ads in a PC magazine.) I find ads in vintage PC magazines to be particularly interesting and fun.

But web ads are typically obnoxious, intrusive, and off-topic. Delivery formats such as pop-up windows and auto-playing video are so disruptive that there are browser settings to block them – settings which web advertisers work tirelessly to subvert. The commercial web has become unusable without ad blockers.

> I think you might be looking at this situation through rose-colored glasses. When I was a kid in the 2000s, I loved reading PopSci and I distinctly remember at least 30-40% of it being ads throughout most of the magazine. And then, the last 20+ pages were all ads.

I was a nerdy kid in the early 80s, and when I wasn't hanging out in computer shops and electronics junk shops, I was often in WH Smith [1] browsing the sci/tech magazines. My recollection is that they were pretty good in terms of articles, and even many of the adverts were interesting. I suspect this was because (before the net) it was hard to find out about stuff that wasn't mainstream: so ads for telescopes or chem kits or single-board computers seemed kind of exotic. Electronics mags with pages of ads listing components were information. And you could actually buy the RS Catalogue there - which, while not a magazine, had so much interesting stuff in it.

And a bit later, Computer Shopper with endless pages of densely-packed ads listing ram chips and cpus and cmos logic chips, and the ink that came off on your fingers...

So the ads were often an important learning resource back then. At least for kids with limited resources like I was.

[1] National chain of newsagents here in the UK.

Ha, I used to work at WH Smith HQ in Swindon. The warehouse people used to nick the cover disks from the magazines and sell them. And each loo on each floor had a fresh new porn mag in the cistern!

Don't even get me on Tales of Farthing Wood which caused a national shitstorm...

Yes, paper catalogs had high information and education content e.g. the Whole Earth Catalog in the US or the IKEA catalog in Europe are cult items.

There are also different national prior probabilities for reading magazines as a habit in different cultures: for example, both the UK and Germany had a strong computer magazine culture, whereas in the US there was less of it (Byte and Dr Dobb's Journal being notable exceptions). The German "c't - magazin für computer technik" is still Europe's largest computer magazine (https://www.heise.de/ct). Europe also has comic magazines by Disney (featuring Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse. & co.), which never existed in the US, unlike the animation films.

> Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads. Even during the Super Bowl, the commercials will be less than 1/3 of the total broadcast time. In the magazines the ads took up well over half of the available pages. Who in their right mind would pay money for that?

The purpose of a lot of the trade press and hobby press is to be an interesting carrier for ads. Literally a list of names and addresses where you can buy things to improve your business or improve the passing of your free time, a bunch of articles talking about new ways to maximize your usage of the things in the ads, and a bunch of articles joking about how goofy the job or hobby and the people involved in it are.

Also important to mention that these are the magazines that are doing the best. They're probably the only thing that people will pay for. And they have to pay less for them, because of all the ads and how well they deliver.

I want to see ads for oscilloscopes in my electronics magazine. I'm also not so dumb that I think the ones advertised will always reflect the best of the market, and to think that the magazines don't have relationships with their advertisers that affect them editorially. Because on the other hand I know that a hobby or trade magazine knows that they're risking their own reputation if they recommend stuff that doesn't work or allow that stuff to advertise. Not like online, where people have no idea what they're being paid to propagate; it's being pulled from some algorithmic ad market that no one claims responsibility for.

Exactly. Yes. The world has changed in many ways but the "all ads are evil" crowd just doesn't represent how people at least historically looked at trades/hobby/etc. magazine content. The ads were part of that content.

As you say, lots of conflicts of interest etc. but ads were part of the package.

Especially because if you are engaged in a particular trade/hobby, a lot of your time is devoted to actually working on the thing. There is no way to organically find out if Haas has released a new machine or Sandvick has new tooling unless 1) a sales rep visits you 2) you see an ad for it in the trade pubs 3) you attend a show/expo.

Guess what! All those three things is marketing. There is no other way to get some information out there adults simply do not have the time. This results in a lot of games, but what part of human life doesn't? We are critical thinking creatures, we can judge for ourselves.

> Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads

Ads were always a big part of it, and indeed pre-internet were a reason to buy a hobby magazine. They carried value in a way they perhaps don't any longer - not because the print ads are different but because access to supplier websites + search engines is more useful.

> a highly targeted and extremely high quality magazine can succeed in the present day. Of course the definition of success won't mean selling millions of copies on newsstands everywhere. It will mean having a loyal subscriber base that provides a largely flat, but sustainable, flow of revenue.

You've just described The New Yorker. (Full disclosure: I'm a loyal subscriber, even though I no longer manage to read every word of every issue.)

Magazines, especially trade press, always had a huge volume of ads. We used to joke when I was a full-time industry analyst that the computer trade press mostly formulaically (including getting quotes from some analyst or other) was about filling the "ad hole."

I do pay for a couple of expensive magazine/newspaper subscriptions but mostly I just have so many other options that I'm mostly not even going to skim a magazine cover to cover.

I subscribed to magazines in the 1970s-80s and really felt I was getting my money's worth. Sure, there was lots of ads, but there was also lots of great stuff. I remember magazines getting thinner, glossier, and more ad-laden in the 1990s so that I just gave up on them. This happened mostly before the Internet.