[Kunst]

It was a strange channel. Had the gimmick of having US style adverts where they go to an ad break immediately after the opening titles.

Don’t know if anyone else remembers but also at this time the Disney Channel was a premium add on (£6 a month as I recall, but it included +1, Toon Disney and Playhouse Disney) with no adverts.

Yeah, it made slightly more sense when Disney Channel started becoming a tween channel (too obsessed with the same kind of shows too) rather than a family channel (starting in 2004 especially), with the likes of 8 SImple Rules and Home Improvement being moved there, but you can't live on the same repeats for ever, of course, so something was bound to happen.
Then it was 2006 when the big changes happened and the Disney premium model shifted to a more "basic" ones, with premium content being moved on Cinemagic, a moved other countries in Europe followed suit.
Advertising only started being added in 2013, soon after the Cinemagic shutdown; but some other European countries added it earlier (e.g. Italy and France in 2007)

But the bust of ABC1 was also due to the fact they couldn't broadcast around the clock on Freeview, the whole premise of a daytime channel was deemed to be a failure from the start!

Eventually, I think they would have found a way to broadcast around the clock on Freeview, just probably it wasn't worth it
Although the potential was clearly there. It would have shut down in a way or the other, given the fact they have shut down everything but the Nat Geo's.

Advertising on ABC1, while invasive, was NOT so invasive, as basically, if I remember correctly, it was sometime after the beginning of the show (prob'ly after the intro and definitely before the credits or something), especially as back then the infamous EU "20 minute rule" (distancing between each internal break) applied.
In general a very silly rule, except in such cases