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Comment by spitfire | Hacker News Reader

Also, if you're of a certain age you remember things like computer shopper magazine. Which, while it had articles, I don't think I ever found one. It was basically a one and half inch thick catalogue.

People paid money to buy a thick catalogue, to see what was shiny and new.

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What was it about ads in magazines that made us actually want to see them. I used to buy guitar magazines and even though I never bought any of it I liked seeing new gear that was coming out. Online I would never bother to check things like that and actually get annoyed by those ads on guitar websites.

I think it's just because of the pushy nature of so many ads on the web or mobile apps.

An example of it done well would probably be The Verge's mobile app for Android when their primary benefactor was Starbucks - when you'd launch it after a while, you'd get a quick ~2 second splash screen that showed the Starbucks logo while the news data was being loaded.

True. I wonder how advertisers could get the kind of engagement online that they got in magazines where people would voluntarily read your entire ad, maybe spending as much as a few minutes on it.

There are better ways to learn about new products on the web, so ads suck more.

I remember Computer Shopper. I used to have a subscription at work. I would keep the issues in a bookcase. Back in the mid nineties, each perfect-bound issue was the size of a major city telephone book and consisted of perhaps a 100 pages of editorial content on decent paper spread out in a sea of advertising on cheaper paper (the kind that gets ink on your fingers). Then, as the internet ramped up, the magazine got slimmer and slimmer. Looking at my bookcase, it was easy to see the trend. I see from their Wikipedia entry† that they finally ceased print in 2009. The started in 1979. I lost track of them in about 2002.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_%28US_magazine...

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