[tibor_a]

Despite the historical value of the ads I quite dislike the ratio to content. I wanted to quickly scan the pages to get the gist what was the merit of C compared to its contemporaries and I spent half the time finding the actual content.

I remember being much better at only seeing the content when I was reading magazines like this in the past but I still wouldn't like to return to those times.

Also I think if it was possible to effectively ban all of the modern marketing techniques as many people want now the economic logic would result in paid magazines with content to ads ratio of 30 to 70.

[ncmncm]

At the time people bought computer magazines mainly for the ads. The articles were filler. Newspapers, too: editors in newsrooms actually called the reportage "filler".

BYTE differed in its filler being of typically better quality, but Computer Shopper was much, much bigger, and much more popular despite its execrable filler because it had more and better ads.

[taftster]

This is so true. I remember back in the day reading computer magazines for the ads, simply because you learned a lot about what new things were coming out. It allowed my young mind to dream about the possibilities. Sometimes the articles somewhat matched the ads, in terms of being modern, but most of the articles were not on the bleeding edge. PCMag probably had a 100:1 ratio of ads to content, if I remember right.

[username223]

I don't know about "mainly for the ads," but I did enjoy them in the early 90s. Moore's Law was going full steam, and hard drives, RAM, and processors were all just barely fast enough to run the latest cool games. Every month you'd see ads for computers, components, and peripherals that were better in ways that really mattered. Computer Shopper was a phone-book-sized candy catalog.

I don't play leading-edge games anymore, so personal computers have been plenty fast for me for years. But I wouldn't mind reading Byte with 50% tasteful, non-creepy ads.

[ncmncm]

Logitech made quite a splash with its "Feels good / Feels better" ad, now almost completely scrubbed from teh innrnets: https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/23267/baby/ or http://www.fimoculous.com/images/ad3.jpg

(It is a shame that they make crap now. Back then their equipment was the best.)

[beezle]

The ads were important yes, very much so. But the content was as well, even in the CS they had a few decent regular columns and features as well. I'd say people bought Byte at least as much for the content, CS more so the ads.

But I do miss those magazines and times, certainly was a lot more "fun" and interesting than today.

[retcore]

From personal memory in publishing in the early nineties, USPO rates publications carrying less than a third of paid advertising pages as first class postage. A impossible cost. This had the useful effect of ensuring that unsold pages went at steep discounts, increasing as your imposition deadline approached. Imposition is the DTP term for layup, the arrangement of pages over a webb offset press to paginate correctly after folding and cutting. With inventory so many options expiring P=1 worthless, I ended up involved in a kind of early computational advertising business. What was very different and impossible to find web publishing equivalent for, was the far better observabity and discovery of the pre long tail in print advertising trading. Lots else looked much like it superficially does today for online.

Incidentally I think that multi month circulation delays were almost always caused by the International Postal Union rules for Direct Injection of bulk mail at wholesale rates. Very small countries you'd need a minimum of 5,000 items per lot. IPU rules effectively created a hysteresis inflection around global readership acquisition and acquisition costs that pumped advertising price cycles.

[Narishma]

How much of that is because you're reading it on a screen? It's easier to skip ads in a paper magazine.

[gmiller123456]

This is why I gave up on magazines in general (even before it was cool). It seems like their entire goal was to make actual content hard to find. The cover would have a list of headlines, then you'd look at the table of contents to see where that was, but it'd be under a different headline there. Then you'd finally get the page number, but around that spot, none of the pages had page numbers, and when you finally find what you're looking for it has an even different title than the cover and TOC. Then, once you start reading, you get to "continued on page ...". And again, none of those pages have page numbers near them, and there'd be yet a different title on the continued part. Not to mention most of the article would be fluff anyway.

[AnimalMuppet]

> It seems like their entire goal was to make actual content hard to find.

cough much of the current web cough