Widespread and
significant use of advertising dates to the latter half of the 19th century, most especially as a principle revenue basis for periodical publications.
There's an excellent, short, readable, and information-dense source on this, by Hamilton Holt (a magazine publisher himself) published in 1909, describing roughly the prior half-century's remarkable development of an advertising-funded publishing industry, and the absolutely corrosive effects visible even then, Commercialism and Journalism. Quoted in the first pages an observation from the 1880s, already nearly three decades prior:
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>
Holt doesn't name his source, I've since learnt it was John Swinton, himself a journalist (chief editorial writer of the New York Times in the 1860s):
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)>