ABSTRACT
During a period of rapid change in their industry in the 1890s, billposters transformed the haphazard business of getting advertisements before the eyes of the public into a matter of commodity exchange. The pursuit of monopoly played a central role in constructing a commodity form of access to pedestrians’ gazes. Monopolist billposters set prices in proportion to the population of likely viewers rather than in proportion to their costs and justified the higher rates by improving the reliability of the service they offered. Over the objections of some Progressive reformers, billposters turned public visibility into a source of private profits.
