Distribute and Be Damned 51
observes, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an increasing
use of advertisements for things such as concerts and entertainments,
48
and Carl Robert Keyes records how periodicals from the time of the
American Revolution encouraged patriotic “citizen consumers”,
49
but it
is approximately one hundred years later that advertising became key to
the success of journals and periodicals.
A number of media historians, including Sumner and Schneirov, follow Theodore Peterson in locating the invention of a modern mass media to the turn of the twentieth century.
50
1893, in particular, was an
important year, in that this was when the publisher Frank A. Munsey
found himself facing $100,000 in debts and with declining sales of his
magazine, Munsey’s Weekly. While it had originally sold some 40,000
copies a week in 1889 with a cover price of 25 cents, by 1891, sales
were starting to fall and the magazine became a monthly one. When
Samuel McClure launched McClure’s Magazine in 1893 with a cover
price of 15 cents, in October of the same year, Munsey slashed his magazine to ten cents and saw circulation increase to 500,000 in six months
and 700,000 by 1897.
51
While Munsey took advantage of technological advances in printing and paper production, effectively repositioning his magazines as cheap pulp titles that would produce a golden age
of genre writing in the early twentieth century, both he and McClure
were the first publishers to realise the advantages that advertising could
bring. McClure’s, Munsey’s, and John Brisben Walker’s Cosmopolitan
(a conservative literary monthly, very different to the magazine of the
same name today) were all sold at below the cost of their production
and instead made their profits from advertising revenue. While niche
titles, particularly the glossies and more highbrow titles, would buck the
trend later in the twentieth century, this funding model would become
dominant throughout the next hundred years for the vast majority of
newspapers and magazines. In recent years, faced with the decimation
of advertising revenues from digital platforms, many publishers have begun to criticise the public for being unwilling to pay for content; yet as
Schneirov observed in the late 1990s, advertising made possible a true
mass media that, in turn, initiated a scheme of cultural production that
become dominant, spreading to other media such as broadcasting.
52
Buchwitz traces the development of radio from a hobbyist medium in
the late nineteenth century to a commercial entity that relied on sponsorship rather than subscriptions from the 1920s onwards to make money,
developing an overlapping four-stage model that she also applies to the
initial stages of Internet commercialisation:
53
• Phase 1: Technology (Radio, 1899–1923; Internet, 1990–1995). At
this point, the medium is largely controlled by technicians and hobbyists who are more concerned with testing and improvement than
content.
observes, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an increasing
use of advertisements for things such as concerts and entertainments,
48
and Carl Robert Keyes records how periodicals from the time of the
American Revolution encouraged patriotic “citizen consumers”,
49
but it
is approximately one hundred years later that advertising became key to
the success of journals and periodicals.
A number of media historians, including Sumner and Schneirov, follow Theodore Peterson in locating the invention of a modern mass media to the turn of the twentieth century.
50
1893, in particular, was an
important year, in that this was when the publisher Frank A. Munsey
found himself facing $100,000 in debts and with declining sales of his
magazine, Munsey’s Weekly. While it had originally sold some 40,000
copies a week in 1889 with a cover price of 25 cents, by 1891, sales
were starting to fall and the magazine became a monthly one. When
Samuel McClure launched McClure’s Magazine in 1893 with a cover
price of 15 cents, in October of the same year, Munsey slashed his magazine to ten cents and saw circulation increase to 500,000 in six months
and 700,000 by 1897.
51
While Munsey took advantage of technological advances in printing and paper production, effectively repositioning his magazines as cheap pulp titles that would produce a golden age
of genre writing in the early twentieth century, both he and McClure
were the first publishers to realise the advantages that advertising could
bring. McClure’s, Munsey’s, and John Brisben Walker’s Cosmopolitan
(a conservative literary monthly, very different to the magazine of the
same name today) were all sold at below the cost of their production
and instead made their profits from advertising revenue. While niche
titles, particularly the glossies and more highbrow titles, would buck the
trend later in the twentieth century, this funding model would become
dominant throughout the next hundred years for the vast majority of
newspapers and magazines. In recent years, faced with the decimation
of advertising revenues from digital platforms, many publishers have begun to criticise the public for being unwilling to pay for content; yet as
Schneirov observed in the late 1990s, advertising made possible a true
mass media that, in turn, initiated a scheme of cultural production that
become dominant, spreading to other media such as broadcasting.
52
Buchwitz traces the development of radio from a hobbyist medium in
the late nineteenth century to a commercial entity that relied on sponsorship rather than subscriptions from the 1920s onwards to make money,
developing an overlapping four-stage model that she also applies to the
initial stages of Internet commercialisation:
53
• Phase 1: Technology (Radio, 1899–1923; Internet, 1990–1995). At
this point, the medium is largely controlled by technicians and hobbyists who are more concerned with testing and improvement than
content.