Radio advertisement

In the United States, commercial radio stations make most of their revenue by selling airtime to be used for running radio advertisements. These advertisements are the result of a business or a service providing a valuable consideration, usually money, in exchange for the station airing their commercial or mentioning them on air. The most common advertisements are "spot commercials", which normally last for no more than one minute, and longer programs, commonly running up to one hour, known as "informercials". The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), established under the Communications Act of 1934, regulates commercial broadcasting, and the laws regarding radio advertisements remain relatively unchanged from the Radio Act of 1927. In 2015, radio accounted for 7.8% of total U.S. media expenditures. Commercial advertising by audio services goes back to even before the introduction of radio broadcasting, beginning with the 1893 establishment of telephone-based Telefon Hírmondó of Budapest, Hungary. As of 1901, this "telephone newspaper" was selling twelve-second spots for one forint each to reach the subscribers listening to the service's programming. The first radio stations, introduced in the late 1800s, used crude spark transmitters, which could only transmit the dots-and-dashes of Morse code. Beginning in the early 1900s, the first transmitters capable of audio transmissions were invented, and although initially these were primarily used for point-to-point communication, there was concurrent experimentation with the broadcasting of news and entertainment. The test transmissions for many of these earliest stations were in effect advertisements for their owners and the new technology. However, it soon became a fairly common practice for stations to arrange to play phonograph records in exchange for mentioning on the air the companies which provided the records. The earliest known example of this practice occurred in July 1912, when Charles Herrold in San Jose, California began making weekly radio broadcasts from his technical school, with the initial broadcast featuring phonograph records supplied by the Wiley B.