Ten Minutes That Changed Radio Forever
On August 28, 1922, New York station WEAF aired the first paid radio commercial — ten minutes selling apartments in Queens for a reported $50.
In the summer of 1922, radio was a miracle in search of a business model. Stations were popping up across America, broadcasting music, news, and lectures to an audience of enthusiastic hobbyists hunched over crystal sets — and nobody had figured out how any of it would pay for itself. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company, which owned New York station WEAF, had an idea it called "toll broadcasting": just as you paid for time on a telephone line, advertisers could pay for time on the air.
On August 28, 1922, at 5:15 in the afternoon, WEAF put the idea to the test. For ten minutes, a representative of the Queensboro Corporation spoke to the station's listeners about Hawthorne Court — a new apartment complex in Jackson Heights, Queens. He described the buildings, the neighborhood, and the easy commute to Manhattan, and invited anyone interested to come see for themselves. It was, by every measure, a real estate ad. It was also the first paid commercial ever broadcast on radio.
The price of that first ad is itself a matter of dispute: accounts variously report $50 or $100 for the ten minutes. Either way, it was a bargain that changed the world. The experiment worked, and WEAF soon had more advertisers than it could handle. Within a few years, "toll broadcasting" had a new name — commercial radio — and the model spread to every station in America. Within a decade, the NBC and CBS networks were built on the same foundation, and the American airwaves have been commercial ever since.
It is hard to overstate what those ten minutes unleashed. The commercial made radio profitable, and profitable radio became the most powerful mass medium on Earth: the home of fireside chats and baseball games, of soap operas — named for the soap companies that sponsored them — and breaking news bulletins. Every podcast ad, every sponsored segment, every "brought to you by" in broadcasting history descends from that afternoon's apartment pitch in Queens.
A century later, we skip ads with a tap and pay subscriptions to avoid them. But the deal struck on August 28, 1922, still defines our media: free content, paid for by someone who wants your attention. Ten minutes, one apartment complex, a reported fifty dollars — and the invention of commercial broadcasting.
No verified public-domain or Creative Commons image related to the first WEAF broadcast could be confirmed for this story, so no photograph is shown.
