Paper magazines still have "blow ins", though - advertising cards that are injected into the magazine with compressed air after printing. They're not bound in. They fall out.

At first I was determined I would purchase the ad-free version (I think the price difference was like ~20€), but after talking to my friend they kind of convinced me that the ad version is not so bad.

2 points on this: 1. The ad appears only on the lockscreen of the device, so you see it once and then never again until you reopen it. The ad is also only for a book in the Kindle store, never anything else (this might seem trivial, but I think one of the negative aspects of advertising is being blasted with stimuli about so many different things you don't care for)

2. The ads are personalized on books you bought and therefor a sort of recommendation engine. Both my friend and my partner told me they got some inspiration from those ads to find books they liked.

So all in all while I despise ads, I gave this one a try. Personally (and yeah, I know – subconciously) I have never looked at the lockscreen apart from the first time I launched it. It's a relatively non-intrusive ad about a book that I don't even need to engage with. And in case something relevant is on there, it leads to a good outcome for me.

This is advertising done well for me at least.