Where did ad supported media come from?
Date: 2025-05-07
Last Updated: 2025-05-07
NOTE: The following historic argument is more or less taken whole cloth from Yannis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism". Go read the book if you want a better explanation. The conclusions drawn from the historical argument are mostly mine.
So obviously advertising has existed as long as markets have existed, but ad supported media is newer than you think. When I say "Ad supported media" I am talking about media which does not cost money to consume, and the producer gets paid from advertisement.
Interestingly this economy is the result of technological progress - not necessarily sociological or economical - a running theme of my political-economic ramblings.
Okay, I am done burying the lead. They come from the invention of broadcast radio and television.
See there is an interesting thing about radio waves. They are everywhere. Your local TV station antenna is broadcasting radio-waves which are beaming right through your body at this very moment.
This makes any radio-broadcast media (TV and commercial radio), very difficult to make money out of. Unlike a newspaper, in which the medium (the paper on which it is printed on) can be tightly controlled, (Since it is sold out of physical newsagencies), there is no way for broadcasters to even know who is receiving their radio-waves let alone charge them money for the privilege.
Go and ask your British friends if they have paid their BBC license to see how well that works.
So, broadcast media operators had to come up with an entirely new way of making money. If you cannot expect the consumer to pay for the product, then they must BECOME the product.
The Web Inherits the Broadcast Model
As the internet began its commercialisation within the dotcom bubble, companies looked for ways to monetize the new medium. Rather than inventing a new economic model, they borrowed the ad-funded playbook from radio and TV.
But where TV couldn’t track exactly who was watching, the web could.
With the rise of cookies, browser tracking, and user profiling, advertisers suddenly had unprecedented insight into individuals. What started as a workaround for broadcast radio’s inability to charge per listener has become a hyper-targeted surveillance machine.
In other words: we didn’t fix the original problem — we turbocharged it.
But what about magazine and newspaper ads?
Yep you got me there. Like I said, advertising has always existed. I will point out that there is a massive difference between media which is supplemented by advertising, like newspapers of old, and media which is totally funded by advertising, like newpapers of new.
There used to be the distinction between "church and state" within newspaper offices. i.e. the advertising team was not allowed to even talk to the journalists, let alone influence them. Now that newspapers are totally hooked on ad dollars, the advertisers have more power over the producers, now we get "Native advertising" filling half the newpapers, and specific brand partnerships between newspapers and external brands - * cough Washington Post *
So while advertising always existed, it did not have so much power over producers.
What does this mean?
The ad supported internet was not an inevitability, and ad supported media is not a fundamental part of the human condition. They are a trend which began with recent technological developments.
Your grandparents were alive in a time before advertising became the only way to fund TV, news and art. I just want to emphasise this to give hope to the idea of building something better.