That's because they push ads at people for what they think they want. That's very different from people buying ads for what those people actually want.

For example, I buy hot rod magazines for ads for cool stuff for my car. I'm not interested in furniture ads in those magazines, and furniture makers don't advertise in car mags. When I want to buy furniture, then I'll buy a home decor magazine and look at furniture ads. I don't want to see a fuel injection pump in a home decor magazine.

Hemmings Motor News is another example of effective advertising. It's nothing but car ads - and people pay for a subscription.

An online example is newegg.com. All it is is computer electronics. It's my go-to location when I'm looking for stuff for my computer. Seeing ads on newegg is exactly why I'm going there.

I tend to watch youtube videos about cars. One day, the absurdity struck me - they're trying to force me to watch ads at the beginning, but the whole video is basically an ad. It's absolutely ridiculous, the idea that I need to watch an ad for something I'm not interested in to "pay" for watching an ad for something I am interested in (albeit I'm probably going to buy neither in the near future).

Of course, if I actually was able to buttonhole some guru at Google who understood the business and my situation, they would just look at me like I was an idiot and say "we warned you that if you turned off the various personalization features the ads wouldn't be relevant".

But if I left every option turned on, the ads wouldn't be better, just creepier.

Modern consumers still actively seek out and consume advertisements (in some contexts). Movie trailers on youtube rack up millions of views. Industry promotional events like E3 receive huge amounts of eager attention from video game consumers. "I watch the Super Bowl for the ads" is a sentiment so common it's basically a meme.

Computer Shopper was more of a condensed catalog of multiple vendors. It served as a search index and comparison pricing utility. Nobody "liked" the ads other than that was the only way to become informed about a wide range of products.

> Nobody "liked" the ads

People like reading ads about products they're interested in. I know I do. This idea that ads are all toxic because their purpose is to sell just isn't right.

In the Computer Shopper case, it was mostly about price discovery for things you wanted to buy. You wanted X. You flipped through pages to find a good price on X.

It was also how I found out that I could now have a whopping 2GB hard disk in my own machine - or that I could upgrade my 486 to a pentium with this cool new thing called the Pentium Overdrive. Computer mags were especially exciting because you got to see the progress of technology.

I think most people back in the day came away from these magazines wanting more things they didn't even know existed prior to opening it up.

I was buying computer magazines in the 90s as much for the ads than for the content. That was the printed version of newegg/ebuyer in some way. I still do browse on those occasionally even when I don’t want to buy anything just to see what’s new and where prices are. And that was a time when clock frequencies were changing month on month!

I think Instagram has nailed this, personally. Their ads get seamlessly placed in your feed, they're usually interesting to look at with high quality graphics and videos, and if I don't want to see them, it's trivial to scroll past them. But the ads have definitely snagged me to make a few impulse purchases this year.

Interesting, I often find the ad selection on Instagram especially abysmal. It might be that my non-US geolocation has a negative effect on this. Most of the ads I get are either generic products for my gender and age range, local industry companies wasting budget on stuff I'm interested in but don't need at scale and won't ever buy through Instagram links, useless recruiting startups aimed at what I assume would be me 15 years ago (and even then I was not interested in this form factor), and of course a wide range of scams from personal finance to Kickstarter products.

I typically get clothing ads, household goods ads, music-related, gadgets, lessons, etc.