You've heard the old saying: Time is Money - Well, advertising space is also money.

From the very earliest beginnings of advertising, space to present the commercial message was always limited by something. If the advertisement was painted or drawn on the wall or rock face, eventually the wall would be full. The papyrus sheets were limited by the size and availability of the sheets, as well as by the attention span of the person reading the commercial message. Later, handbills were prepared and printed, and the advertising space on a handbill was limited by the size of the paper it was printed on.

To purchase advertising space in a newspaper cost money. The larger the space purchased, the more money it required. Even if the marketer chose to purchase a small space, it was crowded into a page with dozens of other like ads and may not even be noticed by the target audience.

Some marketers made their advertising space more visually appealing by increasing the amount of white space around the words or graphic images. This meant you were actually buying white space to make the message stand out more starkly. This is truly a case where space is money.

Sometimes borders are added around the advertising space to make it more decisive. When only a few words are present in the space, the cost is still the same.

Sometimes where the advertising space appears, particularly in print media can make a big difference in the cost of the space. For example, space purchased in the front of a magazine costs less that that buried in the back pages. The same statement is true of newspaper advertising space.

If you look at radio or television advertising space, the concept is the same. Only the space in this case is the space your words occupy, or the space your pictures occupy in the case of television. Advertising space purchased in the wee hours of the morning when fewer viewers are watching will cost less than that purchased during half-time at the Super Bowl.

One possible exception to all of this discussion about advertising space may be advertisements on the internet. Because the internet is three-D so to speak, there is unlimited advertising space. You may have a web site with a limited number of characters of advertising space, but you also have the option of purchasing a larger web site. You also can take advantage of the "3-D" concept by linking your website to others, or linking other websites to yours, so your advertising space is virtually unlimited.