Comment by glimshe
2 days ago
It was wonderful. It's like having the entire industry in your hands. If it's for sale, chances are Computer Shopper has it.
The magazine was nearly 100% ads and I could spend a long time doing nothing but consuming ads. Nonetheless, I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
Indeed. The ads were the point of Computer Shopper. The reason it worked so well is the advertisers knew their most aggressive price competitors would also have ads, so it would be pointless to advertise unless you knew you could compete. While companies always prefer to avoid such side-by-side comparisons, the number of readers of Computer Shopper was simply too large to resist for many.
> I never felt annoyed by them like I do with animated and pop-up ads.
How else are they going to force you to view advertisements for things that you are completely uninterested in and which are completely unrelated to the page you are viewing?
Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it.
If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop.
Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious.
So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.