The Theory of the Niche and Spending on Mass media: The Case of the "Video Revolution"

This article briefly reviews research on the principle of relative constancy and concludes that further research using aggregate consumer and advertiser spending data should be suspended because the principle does not represent a theoretically based hypothesis but is simply an unexplained empirical generalization. Instead, I propose that further theory building and research is necessary to explain consumer and advertiser spending on the media and offer suggestions on the conduct of such research. I employ the theory of the niche and elements of the theory to explain the anomaly of the "video revolution" that stands as a major exception to constancy.