Classified advertising
form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals
Classified advertising is a form of advertising, particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals, which may be sold or distributed free of charge. Classified advertisements are much cheaper than larger display advertisements used by businesses, although display advertising is more widespread. They were also commonly called "want" ads, starting in 1763, and are sometimes called small ads in Britain.
History
Handwritten classified ads, written by scribes and nailed to posts, began appearing in England in the 1600s. They were called si quis—meaning "if anybody knows of"—similar to notices posted in ancient Rome. In America, a 1704 ad in the first issue of The Boston News-Letter was written by the publisher: "To all persons who have any houses, lands, tenements, farms, ships, vessels, goods, wares or merchandises to be sold or let, may have the same inserted at a reasonable rate." The very earliest ads in the News-Letter were for lost anvils, stolen clothing, and Oyster Bay, NY real estate. "Lost and found" sections soon became common. By 1765, 11 of 13 colonies hosted 23 weekly newspapers whose back pages carried classified ads.
Newspaper classifieds
Advertisements in a newspaper are typically short, as they are charged for by the line or word, and are one newspaper column wide.
Publications printing news or other information often have sections of classified advertisements; there are also publications that contain only advertisements.
“Classified advertising” enters the record as form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Classified, advertising and form can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q614278. The Library of Congress control number is sh85001178. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1763, 1704 and 1765.
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This entry incorporates text from “Classified advertising” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.