> didn't that take a shitload of time and effort?

Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue.

Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold into my back pocket, and more readable on the bus. Just turn the page and continue reading, no interruptions.

One time there I remove so many pages ( 20? a lot anyway ) that I actually spent money on postage and sent them back to the Editor with the suggestion that he spend his time reading them for me and provide a summary.

Did you remove less than 50% of the paper? I guess the equivalent to online publishers' attempts to prevent ad-blocking would be simply to stop printing adverts on both sides of a page. Presumably, publishers had no incentive to do that because, as far as they were concerned, they still got paid for the adverts. And the number of people ripping ads out of magazines must be a tiny percentage, of course.

This I did as well when The Economist arrived. They make it easy since half of the ads are printed full-page on both sides. Took like 30 seconds to do and did make reading much more enjoyable. Now (wow, has been years now) I use the digital edition on iPad and listen to it more than I read it, but when reading I do look at the ads as there are fewer and of high quality in the app edition.

This big effort could serve as an indicator how experience damaging those ads were perceived to be.

If you create great costs (like ripping 30 pages from a magazine) for a small gain is this a particularly well intended economic strategy?