This is also a good description of how advertising was done in the 20th century. Ads were simply everywhere: on street hoardings and bus shelters, on the walls of tube stations, in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television (though not on the BBC!). They were not targeted at anyone in particular but rather deliberately exposed to the maximum number of eyes in the hope that someone somewhere would say, “Hey! I want one of those.”
Advertising and the newspaper trade were always closely entwined. Advertisements (both commercial displays and private classified ads) had from the beginning provided a secondary income stream for papers but some time during the 20th century, it became the primary income. Newspapers quietly changed from businesses that sold news to the public into a means of selling audiences to advertisers. One sign of that was the disappearance of broadsheets. When I was a girl, the tabloid format was used exclusively for the gutter press, papers like the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch, which printed mainly scandalous exposées and sports news and were read by the sort of people who could not afford better. Serious newspapers like the Times, the Manchester Guardian (as it then was), the News Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph, were broadsheets.
That was fine when the chief source of income was the readers. The difference in format was a quick and useful way of telling prospective readers whether this was their kind of paper or not. But they had an obvious disadvantage when the chief source of income was advertising fees. These depended on the visual impact of an ad and therefore on the percentage of the page that it occupied. Half a page was half a page as far as advertisers were concerned, but half a page in a tabloid used only half the amount of paper and ink as half a page in a broadsheet. So it was very much in the interests of newspaper proprietors to go tabloid as their primary income shifted to advertisements. The Daily Mail switched in 1971, the Times in 2004, the Guardian and Observer in 2018.
Of course none of this shifted the emphasis on circulation size. The difference was that in the past a higher circulation meant more money coming in from people purchasing the paper; nowadays it simply means that the paper can charge its advertisers a higher rate. In fact a number of modern papers come entirely free to the reader, being financed exclusively from ads. At first it was only local papers that went down this route, which was a great pity as they largely froze out the longstanding paid-for local papers which had been in their time such a valuable school for young journalists. Local papers used to contain reports from the local magistrates' court and a lively letters page. The free papers, because they have to be produced cheaply, do not contain systematic local reportage and the letters are mostly boilerplate text from council officials and charities. We also have a kind of national freebie, the Metro, which publishes in several major UK cities. Even the venerable London Evening Standard became a free paper for a while before it shrivelled into an online news source.
When the general public (as distinct from university students) started to use the internet, naturally advertisers began to use it too. Advertisers go where the audience is. And free services like search engines and email hosts had to finance themselves somehow. As the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, that’s because you are the product. But I think that in the beginning, this was still broadcasting. Advertisers just used the internet as a new and increasingly popular kind of television with a potentially huge audience.
I don’t know when this changed and broadcasting became narrowcasting. But I do know that modern internet advertising is a completely different thing from anything that has gone before it. Modern social networking sites are a means of mainlining ads directly into the brains of susceptible individuals, because that is a thing that companies with something to sell will pay over the odds for. They are no longer interested in paying extra money to broadcast an ad to the widest possible audience in the hope that it will somehow trickle into the brains of the few who might actually buy the product. They want to find those few individuals algorithmically and then show them the advertisement.
Narrowcasting is possible on the internet because the modern internet is ruled by algorithms. You need an algorithm to measure second by second the degree of involvement of each and every user of a social media site in the currently displayed page, as shown by their clicks and scrolls. You need an algorithm to price advertising space on the page accordingly, because it changes from second to second depending on how firmly the page is holding the viewer’s attention. And you need an algorithm to find the precise advertisers who will pay that often inflated price to have their ad displayed to just that user. Two different users viewing the same page will see quite different ads depending on what they are known to have clicked on in the past.
All those algorithms exist and they are partly responsible for what has been called the enshittification of the internet. There are other causes of this, such as the need to impress crawling indexer bots so that sites can rise higher in the Google search results, rather than providing interesting text or images for human readers. But advertising is definitely responsible for the growing lurch towards deliberately addictive material. There is no evidence that the internet in itself is inherently addictive. The problem is that social media sites like Facebook and TikTok are designed and carefully crafted to be addictive because that allows the company to charge a much higher rate to their advertisers. What effect this might have on the users, who are often underage children with developing brains, is a matter of little or no interest to them. When money walks in at the door, conscience flies out of the window.
A further consequence is that companies such as Facebook and Google are now motivated to collect huge amounts of personal information on their users, gleaned without real consent from a considerable variety of available sources, so as to be able to target output more and more specifically. This of course will increase the financial value of their narrowcast advertising space and increase their profits. For example, your shopping habits, as registered on your supermarket loyalty card could be “shared” with such companies. Facebook even maintains “shadow profiles” for people who may not actually be FB users, containing all the information about them that can be determined from the accounts of their friends and various kinds of publicly available data such as electoral rolls. If you detach yourself from Facebook and scrub your account, your shadow account details remain on record.
Old-style broadcast advertisements are and always were a nuisance to everybody, but there is no evidence whatever that they do any real harm to those who are obliged to look at them (with the possible exeption of street ads which might distract drivers and cause accidents). Narrowcasting is often presented as a great improvement for users as well as for advertisers because, it is said, you are spared all those ads for goods and services that would not interest you anyway. You see only relevant advertisements. But considering all the side effects, from the economic encouragement of deliberately addictive sites to the enhanced motivation of site owners to invade privacy, this development has a lot of potential harm to answer for.
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