IV

Meanwhile, there had appeared in connection with this new institution, “The Press,” a certain factor of the utmost importance:  Capitalist also in origin, and, therefore, inevitably exhibiting all the poisonous vices of Capitalism as its effect flourished from more to more.  This factor was subsidy through advertisement.

At first the advertisement was not a subsidy.  A man desiring to let a thing be known could let it be known much more widely and immediately through a newspaper than in any other fashion.  He paid the newspaper to publish the thing that he wanted known, as that he had a house to let, or wine to sell.

But it was clear that this was bound to lead to the paradoxical state of affairs from which we began to suffer in the later nineteenth century.  A paper had for its revenue not only what people paid in order to obtain it, but also what people paid in order to get their wares or needs known through it.  It, therefore, could be profitably produced at a cost greater than its selling price.  Advertisement revenue made it possible for a man to print a paper at a cost of 2d. and sell it at 1d.

In the simple and earlier form of advertisement the extent and nature of the circulation was the only thing considered by the advertiser, and the man who printed the newspaper got more and more profit as he extended that circulation by giving more reading matter for a better-looking paper and still selling it further and further below cost price.

When it was discovered how powerful the effect of suggestion upon the readers of advertisements could be, especially over such an audience as our modern great towns provide (a chaos, I repeat, of isolated minds with a lessening personal experience and with a lessening community of tradition), the value of advertising space rapidly rose.  It became a more and more tempting venture to “start a newspaper,” but at the same time, the development of capitalism made that venture more and more hazardous.  It was more and more of a risky venture to start a new great paper even of a local sort, for the expense got greater and greater, and the loss, if you failed, more and more rapid and serious.  Advertisement became more and more the basis of profit, and the giving in one way and another of more and more for the 1d. or the 1/2d. became the chief concern of the now wealthy and wholly capitalistic newspaper proprietor.

Long before the last third of the nineteenth century a newspaper, if it was of large circulation, was everywhere a venture or a property dependent wholly upon its advertisers.  It had ceased to consider its public save as a bait for the advertiser.  It lived (in this phase) entirely on its advertisement columns.

V

Let us halt at this phase in the development of the thing to consider certain other changes which were on the point of appearance, and why they were on the point of appearance.