This isn’t confined to print media, however, nor is it a symptom of the modern internet. Similarly, The Wall Street Journal knows that it has a much more affluent subscriber base, which is why it’s the paper that’s more likely to run ads for higher-end haberdasheries and luxury cars. Even back in the 1950s, advertisers knew that more housewives read the Sunday edition, and would therefore target ads for groceries and household supplies in those particular issues. In print media, the fees you pay to buy or subscribe to your daily newspaper simply covered the costs of physically printing the paper and getting it to the local newsstand or your front door - they don’t even begin to cover the costs of paying journalists and other staff, or even the cost of keeping the lights on at your local newspaper office.Įven though the ads shown in your local paper may have seemed quite random, even 100 years ago, advertisers and publishers were trying to collect demographic data on their subscribers so that they could target their ads in the best places.
Print newspapers ran ads as their primary source of income for over a century. It’s just that modern technology has made that data more available.
To be clear, advertising has always been a data-hungry industry. Instead, the costs of running these services are paid for by advertisers, and these advertisers need data to ensure that they’re getting the most out of their advertising dollars.
