st advertisement that
ever appeared in a newspaper was given by the E. & T. Fairbanks
Company, and published in the New York "Tribune," which charged $3000
for it. Now the twenty large department stores alone of New York City
spend, so it is estimated, $4,000,000 a year for advertising, while one
Chicago house is said to appropriate $500,000 a year for publicity in
order to sell $15,000,000 worth of goods. Those products which are
believed to be advertised to the extent of $750,000 or more a year
include the Uneeda Biscuits, Royal Baking Powder, Grape Nuts, Force,
Fairy Soap and Gold Dust, Swift's Hams and Bacon, the Ralston Mills
food-products, Sapolio, Ivory Soap, and Armour's Extract of Beef. The
railroads are also very large general advertisers. In 1903 they spent
over a million and a quarter dollars in publicity, though this did not
include free passes for editors, who, I may parenthetically remark,
thanks to the recent Hepburn Act, are now forced to pay their way
across the continent just like ordinary American citizens.

It is computed that there are about 20,000 general advertisers in the
country and about a million local advertisers. Between the two,
$145,517,591 was spent in 1905 to get their products before the public.
The Census gives only the totals and does not classify the advertising
that appears in the dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. The Rev. Cyrus
Townsend Brady, however, has made a very illuminating study[1] of the
advertising and circulation conditions of 39 of the leading monthly
magazines published in the United States. The first thing that struck
his attention was the fact that candid and courteous replies to his
requests for information were vouchsafed by all the publishers--quite a
contrast to what would have happened from a similar inquiry a
generation ago. He next discovered that these 39 magazines, which had
an aggregate circulation of over 10,000,000 copies per month, could put
a full-page advertisement into the hands of 600,000,000 readers, or
seven times the population of the United States, for the astonishingly
insignificant sum of $12,000, or for two thousandths of a cent for each
reader.

[1] _The Critic_, August, 1905.

The amount paid by the purchasers of these 39 magazines was
$15,000,000, for which they received 36,000 pages of text and pictures,
and 25,000 pages of advertisements. Magazine advertisements are better
written and better illustrated than the reading matter.