This paper explores the various reasons for the development of non-financial reporting typical for the period of the creation and diffusion of public corporate reporting as an element of socioeconomic relations, from the early nineteenth century to the present. The motives of companies forming practices of non-financial reporting, unrelated to content of information and satisfaction of information requests by potential users of reporting data, are analyzed. We reveal characteristics of the activities of economic entities that shape the distribution of public corporate non-financial reporting: the desire for self-presentation, which determines the use of new types of reporting as a kind of advertising; socially sensitive behavior that makes reporting a tool to ensure compliance with requirements of the economic environment; and the search for new competitive advantages, in which are a company’s reporting is a sign of belonging to the progressive part of the business community. For the first time among studies of public non-financial reporting, this paper explores Russian jointstock companies’ annual reports in the second half of the nineteenth century (1885-1900), including those published in the “Bulletin of Finance, Industry and Commerce”; and laws and regulations from pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet period in the first half of the twentieth century. Using these data, this article develops theoretical foundations regarding corporate reporting issues, the basis of which can support further research in economics and sociology, especially patterns of the dissemination of new types of goods. The results of this research can be used to solve problems of regulating new types of public corporate reporting.