[dredmorbius]

Actually, not so much. There was some but largely limited advertising in the 19th century, but the start date was February of 1860, when The Atlantic accepted its first print ad. The practice exploded in the late 19th and early 20th century, with the rise of the factory process and widespread distribution networks, such that goods could be centrally produced and sold in distant markets.

Alexander Holt discussed this in a 1909 lecture, "Commercialism and Journalism", presented at the University of California and published as a small book. It's available on the Internet Archive, and the first section has a considerable overview of advertising practices and statistics:

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/n...

Quoting:

In olden times the dailies carried only a very little advertising --- a few legal notices, an appeal for the return of a strayed cow, or a house for sale. It is only within the past fifty years that advertising as a means of bringing together the producer and consumer began. And, curiously enough, the men who first began to appreciate the immense selling-power that lay in the printed advertisment were "makers", or "fakirs", of patent medicines. The beginning of modern advertising is in fact synchronous with the beginnings of the patent-medicine business.

The remainder of the essay is mostly a cautionary exploration of the consequences of commercially-financed press.

[jasode]

>, but the start date was February of 1860, when The Atlantic accepted its first print ad

Can you explain the criteria for "advertising" such that 1860 is marked as the significant date? There were paid ads in newspapers/pamphlets in the 1600s:

https://www.brent.gov.uk/media/387509/Newspaper_advertising_...

That said, I think it's reasonable to set boundary date of when newspapers switched the majority of their sustainable revenue from subscriptions to ads. However, I'm not sure The Atlantic in 1860 is an example of that.

[dredmorbius]

Consider what it takes to have a substantial advertising market: you need goods, you need buyers, you need sellers who are providing a great deal of a good (or are selling very high-ticket items for which buyers are thin), and you need means for transporting both the advertisments and the goods to buyers.

Hamilton Holt, a publisher himself (of The Independent magazine) starts off the linked work by detailing this. The first 10-15 pages cover a lot of ground, I highly recommend you read them if you haven't. Keep in mind that Holt is largely limiting himself to US practice, so specifics of earlier European publishers may be missed. But he is also focusing on the business volume of advertising, not simply the existence of occasional adverts or notices in publications.

What your link describes in considerable detail are early instances of advertising, and a few specific publications which carried them. They're drawn from across England and France, as well as the US, but don't give an impression of a thriving advertising industry, which is precisely what Holt is talking about (there are a slew of similar and related works at TIA from the 1890s to 1920s covering the boom, many offering advice to publishers, or more often, businessmen who are looking at this newfangled thing called "advertising" -- it's surprisingly interesting reading, at least for me).

I'd argue that this passage from your reference largely makes my point: that advertising wasn't a truly significant force until the 1850s, due to a confluence of factors. Again, it's patent medicines (small packages, complex product that has to be marketed, travels well, premium price, mass production) which launched the phenomenon:

The abolition of the advertising tax in 1853, the duty on newspapers in 1855 and the duty on paper in 1861 created a new environment for advertisers and publishers alike. Thomas Holloway (1800-1883), a purveyor of quack pills, was spending over £30,000 a year on advertising by 1855.

QED.

[jasode]

>substantial advertising market [...] thriving advertising industry, [...]

Whenever I see that "newspapers were always ad supported", I take it to mean the mainstream press and not the early financial papers that went to subscribers on Wall Street or the political news that was paid for by wealthy patrons. (Mainstream == readership of working class people.)

The "penny press" in the 1830s[1] is an example of lowering the price from 6 pennies to 1 which enabled a wider readership. Advertising made those economics of mainstream publishing possible 30 years before Holt's focus on an "advertising industry". I understand Holt's logic but to me, the idea of advertising quantity is not relevant to how the earlier advertising created the financial support for mainstream newspapers.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press

[dredmorbius]

Holt addresses this, the advertising vs. subscriptions rates dynamic and how that affects circulation, the first fully free advertising circulars, and the 30x growth of publishing 1850 - 1905. That's 3000% growth, mind, not 30%.

[hga]

Wasn't political party support also a source of income? In those more honest days, papers didn't pretend they were "objective", and you'll see traces of this today in some papers that retain "Republican" or "Democrat" in their names (Whigs, not that I remember. :-)

[dredmorbius]

Very much so. I was going to mention that but figured I'd rambled on enough already.

You might enjoy a piece I wrote about a year ago on J.P. Morgan and the purported "Banker's Manifesto" of 1892. (It proves to be a hoax.) The investigation took me through quite a few old newspaper archives, many of them political organs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

The Arizona Republic, commenting on its own endorsement of Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, the first presidental endorsement for that party in the paper's 150+ year history, noted that it was originally known as the Arizona RepublicAN.