> 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.