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Magazines primarily make money through advertising.

Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.

It’s a bit harder to find stuff in a magazine that helps troubleshoot a water pump at night…

I’m going to shock you, but you can pay for magazine-like content through the Internet right now.

That information used to come with the water pump

How many people keep those docs around? It’s also easier to search on YT than rifle though the pump manual which may include all failure modes…

You do realize that sponsored stories aren’t modern invention? Magazines were full of it too, sometimes disclosed, most often not.

And? They’d be banned too.

In fact they were, and perhaps even still are, however regulators have simply stopped enforcing consumer protection laws in the past 20 years. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme and Ronald Regan became the king of Europe.