Rogán's ex wife continues to amass business successes with her tabloid, companies with ties to government appear in background

Although the Hungarian economy has slowed down in recent years, this has not presented an obstacle to Cecília Rogán-Gaál, the former wife of the powerful minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office.

Top News Hungary, the company publishing the tabloid Top World News has been steadily generating revenues over HUF 1 billion (2.5 million euros) a year. The business, which is minority-owned by Rogán-Gaál’s friend, model Kata Sarka operates with an efficiency that is not typical on the Hungarian media market at all. In the last three years, 80-90% of its revenues were profit, most of which the owners took out as dividends.

Last year, Top News Hungary generated HUF 1.1 billion profit after tax, almost 88 percent of its HUF 1.27 billion revenue. Most of this, over HUF 1 billion, was taken out as dividends by the owners, meaning that they were free to spend this money on private purposes.

“This is absurd, there is no way this is real economic performance. Achieving such a result in the current Hungarian market and beyond is impossible” – Ágnes Urbán, economist, university lecturer and researcher at the Mérték Media Analysis Workshop told Direkt36 two years ago, when we first looked at the extraordinary business results of Cecilia Rogán-Gaál’s company.

The performance of Top News Hungary is outstanding again this year. For example, Central Media Group, one of Hungary’s largest independent media companies has for years been able to generate a profit of 15-18% at the most from its annual turnover of around HUF 13 billion (33.2 million euros). It is telling that last year their after-tax profit was HUF 2.3 billion, (5.3 million euros) only twice as much as the company of Rogán’s ex-wife.

Central has achieved this by publishing Nők Lapja magazine, 24.hu and many other of the country’s most widely read printed and online publications. By comparison, Top News Hungary only has one known publication, Top World News (twn.hu), which, according to data from Gemius, did not rank among the 50 most visited Hungarian websites at any point in 2023, based on monthly views.

Since twn.hu is available to anyone, there is no subscribers-only content, so in principle advertising is its only source of revenue. We sent several questions to Top News Hungary to find out how they managed to achieve such an outstanding business result again, and who exactly advertises on their site, for how long and for how much. We did not receive a reply to any of our questions by the time this article was published.

Advertisements from circles close to the government

Two years ago, when we examined the ads on twn.hu, we found that the site ran a large number of the government’s short films, which at the time criticized the sanctions against Russia and praised the price freezes and the cuts in the electricity bill introduced by the Hungarian government. In 2022, the site also featured ads of the state-owned Szerencsejáték Plc. The ownership rights of this company were at the time exercised by the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister led by Antal Rogán, the former husband of Cecília Rogán-Gaál. In addition, twn.hu also featured a large number of advertisements for a programme of the pro-government TV2, whose partner was the Hungarian Tourism Agency, also led by Rogán.

When we checked the site in recent weeks, we found advertising related to government circles again. An advertisement promoting the Gondosóra programme appeared several times. This is a government project funded by the European Union. Under the programme, seniors over 65 can receive a wrist-mounted emergency alert device that enables them to call for immediate help in case of an emergency.

According to information on the project’s website, the Gondosóra service is provided by 4iG, a company that has been helped in many ways by the Orbán government. Péter Elkán, communications manager of 4iG Group told Direkt36 that the promotion of the Gondosóra programme is the responsibility of the Kormányzati Szolgáltató Központ Nonprofit Ltd. This state-owned company also falls under the authority of the Cabinet Office of Prime Minister, led by Antal Rogán.

In the last few days, the site has also featured the government’s well-known blue posters promoting its own actions and the advertisements of Nemzeti Rendezvényszervező Ügynökség about the events planned for the celebrations of Statehood Day on 20 August. The Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister headed by Antal Rogán is also responsible for government communications, and the Nemzeti Rendezvényszervező Ügynökség (NRÜ) is also part of Rogán’s ministry. We have sent questions about the advertising to both the NRÜ and the Cabinet Office, but have not received a reply.

An advertisement appearing on twn.hu does not necessarily mean that Top News Hungary Ltd. had a contract with the state or other advertisers, as these advertisements, along with many others on the site were placed on twn.hu through Google’s advertising system, Google Ads. The way this system works is that the advertiser can specify a target group to which they want to send their ad and Ads then selects where to place the ad to meet these criteria from the pages in its system. However, Google Ads also allows advertisers the option to choose exactly where they want to place their ad.

Several other advertisers with close links to the Hungarian government also appear on twn.hu.

One of these players is Vodafone, which is owned by the Hungarian state and 4iG. There are many and varied advertisements on twn.hu, but during the period under review Vodafone advertisements were present on the site in particularly large numbers. There were days when almost every second article had an ad for the telecoms company underneath it. The state obtained a stake in Vodafone at the beginning of 2023, after acquiring the telecoms giant's Hungarian subsidiary Vodafone Hungary Zrt. in a 51:49 deal, in cooperation with a subsidiary of 4iG.

“Vodafone Hungary and our subsidiaries have no business relationship with Top News Hungary Ltd.”, Péter Elkán, Communications Manager of the 4iG Group told Direkt36. He added that “nowadays, only a small slice of digital marketing is done by advertisers buying ads targeting specific sites", and in fact "it almost doesn't matter which site the ad appears on, as long as it is seen by a visitor who is in the intended target group". In his view, the reason why our colleague saw so many Vodafone ads while browsing the twn.hu pages was that the digital advertising system’s algorithm had assumed that he was in the target group for the company’s ads.

Elkán made the same point with regard to the Gondosóra ads, saying that the ads of this service are only visible to visitors because their digital footprint, interests and search history match the ad’s parameters. Another advertiser with close government ties that has appeared on twn.hu in recent weeks is Libri, which also had a large number of ads on the site, also through the Google advertising platform. The Libri Group was acquired a year ago, in the summer of 2023, by the government-owned company of Mathias Corvinus Collegium, which now owns 98.41% of the book selling giant. MCC has received large amounts of taxpayer money, having been given over 100 billion forints in direct state subsidies in recent years.

In response to Direkt36’s question, Libri said that their advertisements were published automatically on twn.hu, as part of a media package containing hundreds of platforms.

News source

Publicly available traffic data shows that the vast majority of twn.hu readers come from two so-called news aggregator sites, Kapu and Hírkereső. These aggregators do not produce their own content but collect links to material from other websites and organize them thematically. News sites can pay to have their news included in Kapu and Hírkereső, so they can buy clicks and traffic.

But there is another source of audience for twn.hu. Readers can also reach the site if other, more popular newspapers cite Cecília Rogán-Gaál’s tabloid as a news source.

In our 2022 article, we already showed that atv.hu, the website of the television channel ATV, referred to Top World News as a source in several cases, including news on public affairs, tabloid pieces and traffic information, even when the original source was not twn.hu

According to our current analysis, ATV continues to treat twn.hu as a relevant news source: this year alone, they have referenced five articles from them, typically tabloid material that twn.hu has also reviewed from somewhere else. For example, in January, an article appeared on atv.hu about a police raid on an Austrian registry office with the headline: “Young groom arrested at wedding, bride had a nervous breakdown.”

The article cites a twn.hu article with a similar title as a source, which in turn references an Austrian newspaper, Kurier, as the original source. It is not clear why atv.hu felt it necessary to direct readers to Top World News for a news item of such moderate importance to Hungarian readers.

It is not only ATV that is trying to point its audience towards twn.hu. Rogán-Gaál’s tabloid also often references ATV, which is natural, since the TV channel’s website is a news portal. However, twn.hu not only references ATV in news articles, but also regularly introduces the social media posts of the channel’s presenters.

In one of their articles, they praised the wife of one of the presenters who “smiles at the camera in a pretty dress”, and in another news piece they reported about one of the channel’s employees having gotten a new dog. Articles titled The aliens? The Cabal?” – ATV presenter shocked when she turned on Netflix, or ATV presenter shows her boyfriend for the first time: a liver paté brought them together – Photos can all be found on the site.

Although ATV also provides coverage on the opposition’s opinions, the fact remains that the group behind the channel has been the beneficiary of certain state decisions in recent years. For example, an association linked to the ATV Group has been granted a radio frequency for 10 years thanks to a decision by the state media authority. Government advertisements also appear regularly on ATV.

ATV and Top News Hungary Kft. can also be linked through their officials. The CEO of ATV Zrt., Sándor Szilárd Németh, has a joint company with István Bessenyei, who is the husband of Kata Sarka, the minority owner of Top News Hungary. The company, called Naphire.hu Ltd. is registered at the same address in the 10th district of Budapest as ATV Plc.

“There is no formal or informal agreement or cooperation between ATV and the company you mentioned”, the press department of ATV said in response to our question, adding that “atv.hu regularly republishes news from other media outlets and makes sure to identify the source, just as news from ATV are shared by many news websites”. They added that “Sándor Szilárd Németh has no connection with the news portal you inquired about and has no knowledge about its operation.”

In addition to ATV, Index.hu, a portal with close ties to the government has also repeatedly referenced twn.hu’s articles as a source. One of this year’s first news, a story about a firecracker accident in Germany, was taken over from the tabloid, and in 2023, titles such as the following were used to drive traffic to twn.hu: “Evelin’s videos are really taking off on TikTok: she makes herself look like stars, the resemblance is striking”, “Internet users can’t get enough of the shepherd dog that hid in a surprising place to escape fireworks”, “Half the internet is both sorry for and laughing at the dog that turned into a mystical creature after having his hair trimmed”.

Index.hu’s publisher, Index.hu Zrt. also operates a site called Velvet.hu, which contains a much larger number of articles taken over from twn.hu than Index. Since 2022, the magazine has taken over more than 30 articles from twn.hu on a wide variety of topics. Among others, they have published articles about storing eggs in the fridge door, the wreckage of the Titanic and someone who had married a goat.

In their response to our questions, Index said that they did not think that the articles they had taken from twn.hu constituted a review. They considered our further questions irrelevant and wrote that they did not see what they have to do with this matter.