> 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.