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Dang, we think battling adds is something new. Byte magazine was 60% ads.
by UberFly 3y ago
Dang, we think battling adds is something new. Byte magazine was 60% ads.
- musicale 3y agoI greatly prefer BYTE's ads to 99.9% of modern internet advertising. Enthusiast magazines still seem to work well for having relevant and interesting advertisements.
- pulvinar 3y agoA couple of critical differences from today though: almost all the ads were of interest to the reader of Byte, and these were often the only practical source of information we had on things. No googling and popping over to their website.
- 082349872349872 3y agoIf anyone bought Computer Shopper for the articles, it was rare (or maybe even rare squared).
- ghaff 3y agoComputer Shopper had enough low rent articles (what we'd probably consider akin to content farms today) to technically be a magazine. But really it was a huge book of ads.
- usrusr 3y agoBack then every niche market big enough to create advertisement demand fueled a market for special interest magazines to match those ads to the audience the advertiser is interested in. Today you can advertise even tiniest niche on content as generic cat videos.
- ezconnect 3y agoI always viewed technical magazines as pages of advertisement because we don't see them on TV and it was the only platform for them to be noticed when there was less adaption of internet.
- reaperducer 3y agoLess adoption? There was no internet to adopt in 1981. If by some miracle your computer was on a network, it was CompuServe or Delphi or that one that catered to Apples. If you wanted to send an email, you did it at a public terminal at a university or a hippie tech commune.
- mistrial9 3y agomore specifically, there were two kinds of centralized network engineers in those days: military trained, and those that named their servers after Tolkien characters. The de-centralized BBS operators over common-carrier telephone lines were supposedly "hobbyists" but the patterns they established grew stronger over time. "hippie" is a slur btw, no one that was one would say that.. The word comes from a Look Magazine article on San Francisco IIR
- reaperducer 3y agoIf you think hippie is a slur, you weren't there.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoHalf the joy of a Byte magazine issue was looking at all the cool products in the ads. Full page ads for Tektronix Smalltalk workstations, with beautiful shots of exotic windowing systesms? Pages and pages of ads for S100 bus cards with interesting specs, in a city in another country? Yes please. My elementary school library unloaded all their old issues on me in about 1986, and it was even enjoyable going back through the 1980, 1981 issues 5, 6 years later and seeing the stuff that was current at the time. Yes, I was a nerd. Hah. Wish I'd kept those, but they were in bad shape.
- reaperducer 3y agowe think battling adds is something new. Byte magazine was 60% ads. That was a feature, not a bug. Advertising is how you found out about most of what was new. The editorial side could only write about so many things, and when it did, they were often just two or three sentences. We looked forward to the advertising. Heck, there was an 800-1,000 page magazine called Computer Shopper that was nothing but ads, and people loved it.
- rpeden 3y agoThere were local publications like this, too. I used to read Toronto Computes! and The Computer Paper mostly for the ads. I loved seeing all the PC parts prices in the ads from local computer shops. The ads helped me plan my PC builds and upgrades - or, more commonly, they helped me dream about upgrades I wanted but couldn't quite afford!