Evidence for your position: people pay for newspapers and magazines, and pay more for newspapers and magazines without advertising; indeed, the newspapers and magazines with less or no advertising charge less.

Also evidence for your position: the Computer Shopper (US, not UK) eventually bulked up to 1000 pages per month, almost all of which were advertisements by computer companies -- PC builders, parts suppliers, manufacturers, and so forth. But what it did was act as a catalog for all those companies, because you couldn't find them on the web back then. You can track the page count decline against the advent of ubiquitous Internet.