Definition of "advertising"

Advertisings do not by themselves cause a book to 'go'. The circulating libraries are far more useful than any advertising columns.

1899, Walter Besant, The Pen and the Book

[...] the women were presumably going shopping at the department stores growing up along Oxford Street, and the Central's nearness to these stores would make the advertising space in its stations the most expensive on the Underground.

2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, page 117

But the real way to build a successful online business is to be better than your rivals at undermining people's control of their own attention. Partly, this is a result of how online advertising has traditionally worked: advertisers pay for clicks, and a click is a click, however it's obtained.

2013 June 21, Oliver Burkeman, “The tao of tech”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 2, page 48