A newspaper stopped selling its best ad spots and made every advertiser's position a coin flip instead

the problem

Every advertiser wanted the same handful of premium page positions, and no allocation scheme could satisfy them all without favoring someone

background

what everyone would do

Build a better allocation scheme for the scarce premium positions -- a rate-card premium for guaranteed placement, or an elaborate rotating makeup pattern designed to distribute prominence more fairly over time -- the standard newspaper-industry response, all of which still required deciding who got the good spot on any given day.

what they saw

The Daily News saw that a premium position's actual value came from readers' habitual scanning pattern -- they learned where to look for what they wanted, and that habit is what advertisers were really paying for. Remove the fixed, learned location entirely and the premium itself has nothing left to attach to, since no placement is more habitually noticed than any other once nobody can rely on finding the same ad in the same place twice.

the move

According to the Chicago Daily News's own account, published as trade advertising in Printers' Ink in 1918, the paper's answer to the position problem was structurally different from its rivals': it simply refused to sell or promise a fixed position to any advertiser, at any price, ever. The makeup editor placed each ad wherever it fit best on a given day, rotating placement so that 'by the process of rotation, every advertiser gets both fat and lean, and thus is equilibrium maintained.' The paper's stated reasoning was that because readers never learned to associate a specific location with a specific advertiser, an ad placed in what would elsewhere be considered a less prominent spot drew just as much attention as one in a premium position -- removing the habitual scanning pattern that gave fixed position its value everywhere else.

why it works

By refusing to sell or guarantee position at all, the makeup editor could place ads purely by what fit the page that day, and because that placement genuinely varied, readers never developed the fixed scanning habits that make a specific location valuable in the first place. Rotating every advertiser through both strong and weak positions over time meant no single advertiser was systematically favored or disadvantaged, achieving a version of fairness that elaborate allocation schemes were trying to approximate through complexity, but reaching it by eliminating the thing being fought over instead of managing the fight.

the payoff

The paper's own account states that advertisers who used the Daily News did so 'year in and year out' despite -- or, in the paper's telling, because of -- never being able to buy preferential treatment. This specific claim comes from the company's own contemporaneous statement about its practice rather than from independent trade reporting, though it is consistent with the uniform, no-special-treatment advertising philosophy independently documented as the paper's founding approach eighteen years earlier.

where it breaks

This only works when the resource's value is genuinely tied to its predictability rather than to some inherent, unchangeable property of the resource itself -- a physical seat's proximity to a stage, for instance, doesn't stop being valuable just because assignment is randomized, since the seat itself is still objectively better regardless of habit. It also depends on advertisers actually accepting the loss of any guaranteed placement in exchange for equal long-run treatment; a competitor willing to sell guaranteed premium position could still poach advertisers who value certainty over equity, especially large accounts unwilling to gamble weekly performance on an unpredictable rotation.

what came after

The policy reads as a direct extension of the paper's founding refusal to let advertisers buy special treatment, applied to the specific, recurring fight over page position that other papers managed through elaborate but still preferential allocation schemes rather than eliminating the scarce resource altogether.

references

1. [1]The Chicago Daily News: The Problem of 'Position' (trade advertisement)Printers' Ink, vol. 103, no. 5 (the Chicago Daily News's own account of its practice), 1918archive.org
2. [2]History of the Chicago Daily NewsHistory of Chicago (Rufus Blanchard, 1900), via Chicagology, 1900chicagology.com

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