Getting advertising was essential to the existence of all newspapers and, in small towns, editors, who were often also proprietors and printers, must have had to spend a huge amount of time canvassing adverts from businesses in the surrounding areas. As papers grew, this would have been the role of the business manager or, in a few cases, someone might be employed on a commission basis. Some journalists, at any rate, began to regard it as demeaning to be asked to help canvass for advertisements. There were advertising agencies that would place advertisements and, as early as 1851, Peter Mackenzie of the Glasgow Reformers’ Gazette was complaining that these were pushing down prices and playing off one newspaper against another. According to Mackenzie, they would not have succeeded if ‘certain precious sheets pretending to great independence, had not been ready to pollute the character of the press by dealing with them and inserting their shabby advertisements on any terms whatsoever’. There was a growing number of such advertising agencies in Scotland. One of the largest, and probably the oldest, Robertson & Scott, based in Edinburgh, dated from 1819. Messrs Keith & Co., also from Edinburgh, were around from 1870 and Wm Porteous & Co. in Glasgow dated from 1865. Charles P. Watson's Newspaper Advertising Agency arrived in the mid-1880s and produced a press directory and advice book, The Advertisers’ Vade Mecum, in 1887, but it does not seem to have got beyond a single edition.

Given the importance of advertising revenue, the first task, usually devolved on the sub-editor, was to calculate what space was left after the advertisements and, no doubt, to check that offers were genuine. When Gladstone removed the tax on advertisements he was confident that what the state lost in revenue would be made up by the gains of the Post Office from posted replies to small advertisements, and this was undoubtedly the case. According to the manager of the Glasgow Herald, small ads were preferred by most papers to large adverts since they interested more people.