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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. |
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