"And now a word from our sponsor.... When the first radio stations signed on in the 1920s, this phrase was unknown to listeners. Fifteen years later, however, advertising ruled the airwaves. Selling Radio recounts the initial difficult coupling of broadcasting and advertising, shows how the triumph of advertising transformed the content of radio programming, and exposes the complicity of business, technology, and government in reducing the promise of radio to the adage that "time is money."".

"Susan Smulyan argues that the emergence of commercialized broadcasting was not an inevitable development but rather the result of a bitter struggle over the form and content of the new technology.

Initially schools, churches, and small businesses sponsored stations, broadcasting local sporting events and such home-grown comedy and musical acts as "The Happiness Boys." In the mid-1920s, the enthusiasm that greeted the idea of a national broadcasting system quickly soured with the announcement that wired networks using AT&T's long lines would be financed by selling radio time to advertisers."