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Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an announcement in print, usually of wants, or of goods for sale. The earliest newspaper advertising in this country is said to have appeared in the New England Weekly Journal, published in Boston in 1728. Announcements relative to books, importations of coffee, runaway slaves, sales of negro girls, a school for negroes, and the departure and arrival of ships are to be found in its advertising columns. Advertisements were considered beneath the dignity of the earlier periodicals. Magazine advertisements began with Scribner's Monthly in 1870. The custom was soon followed by other magazines. One desiring to place an advertisement in a number of papers finds it advisable, at the present time, to make arrangements through some advertising agency, not only to save labor of corresponding, and the payment of numerous small bills, but as a matter of economy. Agencies placing a large amount of advertising are naturally able to make advantageous contracts. A bulletin published by the United States Census Bureau states that in 1905 $145,000,000 was paid for advertisements in American newspapers and in magazines; $15,000,000 for cards, folders, and postals of an artistic nature; $11,250,000 for the signboard advertising that shuts off the traveler's view along our lines of railroad, and $2,000,000 a year for street car advertising. Commercial competition has become so keen, and the love of the American people for a change and for something novel has become so marked that it is well nigh impossible to carry on a prosperous business of any sort without advertising. The large city dailies require to take in from $20,000 to $40,000 a week from advertising. Single issues have been known to earn $30,000 in one day. The large New York dailies ask $70 a column for space. A page in a leading magazine costs from $200 to $500 per issue. John Wanamaker, the famous merchant, is said to have paid the Philadelphia dailies from $50,000 to $75,000 a year apiece for page advertisements. Ayer & Son of Lowell, Massachusetts, are said to spend $600,000 a year in advertising their remedies.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 the entire American advertising business ran through print, signboards and streetcars, and the biggest number it could cite was the $145,000,000 spent on newspaper and magazine advertising in 1905. Two new media arrived almost at once — the first radio commercial is generally dated to New York station WEAF in 1922, and television advertising followed after 1941 — and were in turn overtaken by the internet, so that today more than half of the roughly $300-billion-plus spent annually in the United States goes to digital channels, with Google and Meta alone taking the largest share. The advertising agency, which Aiton's recommends merely to save 'the labor of corresponding' and the paying of small bills, grew into a global industry of creative and media-buying conglomerates. Much of what the entry describes without comment has also been curbed by law: patent-medicine claims of the sort made for the Ayer remedies were reined in by the Federal Trade Commission (created 1914) and later statutes, cigarette advertising left American television in 1971, and the roadside signboards that 'shut off the traveler's view' were restricted by the Highway Beautification Act of 1965.
Written for this edition, 2026.