Harper’s Weekly, the first American newsmagazine, refused to take ads when it started in 1857. Then it sold a half page per issue, which grew to three pages in the 1870s—and then, the more the merrier, at least ninety pages in each issue during the early 1900s. Between 1900 and the late 1920s, annual spending by American advertisers increased from the contemporary equivalent of $6 billion a year to $48 billion.
