Jeffrey Rubel

2026 London

Abstract: For centuries, people in search of love or sex have turned to personal advertisements. By the late 20th century, the personal ad became a common feature of American publications ranging from alternative weekly newspapers to high-brow monthly publications. Why was the personal ad so ubiquitous in the late 20th century, and how was this ubiquity a co-creation of consumers, businesses, and technologies? And, by extension, how did this triadic dynamic shape the personal ad’s transformation alongside the rise of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century? In this talk, I interrogate the network of people, firms, and technologies that shaped late 20th century personals as both a revenue source for periodicals and a dating medium for singles. First, I examine the rise of singles as a consumer group, the role of customer segmentation within the personal ads business, and how singles used and experienced personal ads. Second, I unpack why publications came to depend on personal ads for revenue and how these publications developed systems to profitably manage these ads. I also highlight how personals fueled the rise of singles-focused periodicals as a genre unto themselves. Third, I analyze how the development of pay-per-minute 900 numbers in the 1980s transformed the personals business model and led to the growth of new telephone-based personals services. Thus, by drawing upon insights from archives across the US, sociological research, oral history interviews, and the ads themselves, I demonstrate how personal advertisements are a co-construction of consumer demand, business strategy, and technological innovation. Bringing this dynamic into the late 1990s and early 2000s, I conclude my talk by interrogating why voice personal services were early innovators in Internet dating but failed to gain traction as Internet dating expanded in popularity.