Fidesz-friendly media outlets did not necessarily need readers to attract billions in government advertising

As is well known, one of the most important operating principles of the Orbán system was to centralise everything. At times this reached quite irrational proportions, to the point where virtually all decision-making authority and financial resources related to education, healthcare, public administration, public procurement, the cultural sector, and many other areas ended up being concentrated in the hands of state-owned entities. The perfect illustration of this effort with regard to the Fidesz-aligned media is KESMA/Mediaworks, which was established in 2018, when nearly all pro-government media owners simultaneously pooled their newspapers, TV stations and radio stations into one common entity.

Fidesz promptly issued a government decree classifying this as a matter of national strategic interest, which meant that neither the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH) nor the Media Council was able to intervene. From that point on, Mediaworks operated as Fidesz's gigantic propaganda vehicle. It employed some 2,000 people, operated nearly 500 media outlets, and cost around 50 billion forints (nearly €138 million) a year. As previously reported, these funds were mostly provided through state-funded advertising campaigns.

The running of these campaigns and all government communication, as well as the advertising activities of all state-owned companies was overseen by the National Communications Office, which fell under the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office. The head of this office was Orbán’s cabinet minister, Antal Rogán, who counted as the most influential minister in the Orbán governments. The office would award framework contracts worth tens of billions to the communications and marketing companies belonging to the Balásy Group, which then distributed the produced materials to “friendly” media outlets.

There were, however, a few media outlets closely affiliated with Fidesz which were not absorbed into Mediaworks, but remained on the fringes of this media conglomerate, presumably to maintain the appearance of being independent. This didn't stop them from being among the most enthusiastic disseminators of Fidesz’s propaganda though. Some of these were Pesti Srácok, Demokrata and Magyar Hírlap.

After a lengthy freedom-of-information lawsuit, the investigative journalism nonprofit and watchdog NGO Átlátszó has now obtained the list of advertising expenditures of the former PM’s office, which-among others, lists data relating to nearly 400 advertising campaigns conducted between January 2020 and March 2024. Along with several other Hungarian newsrooms, Telex has also received the database, which is now also publicly available here.

While the advertisements placed in the three papers were ostensibly public service announcements, in practice, they were essentially Fidesz propaganda—such as calls for participating in the national consultations or the “child protection” referendum, or the call to “stop Brussels,” but the campaign presenting the EU sanctions against Russia as “sanctions bombs" threatening Hungary was also among them. All the campaigns were run through the same media agency, New Land Media (owned by Gyula Balásy); the ministry spent a total of 188 billion forints (more than € 519 million) in public funds on this during the time in question. We examined how much of these funds went to Pesti Srácok, Demokrata, and Magyar Hírlap during the above mentioned period of just over four years.

Demokrata-a discrepancy in numbers

The weekly Magyar Demokrata (Hungarian Democrat) currently has a circulation of around 8,000 printed copies, just as it did in 2020. Its online edition has only been officially monitoring its traffic since the summer of 2024, but since then it has maintained a fairly stable daily readership of 15,000. This is considered very low in the Hungarian online press, amounting to just 2.2 percent of the average readership of the market-leading publications—Telex, 24.hu, and Index—over the past three months.

In light of this, the list prices for advertising on their site are shockingly high: for the two most common banner types in the database—static homepage banners and video banners—the weekly rates are 8 million (€22 thousand) and 17.5 million forints (€48,200) respectively. (The Cabinet Office received a 50 percent discount on this, which is roughly the standard list price discount on the market for a major advertiser.)

According to the experts we spoke with, even with this discount, the price is at least ten times higher than what would be realistic in the market—and likely even more than that.

To put this in perspective: at this pricing level, Telex—which reaches 45 times more people daily than Demokrata—could charge 400 million forints (€1,102,000 ) per week for a single front-page video ad. However, this equaled Telex’s total advertising revenue over a roughly three and a half month-period last year.

Pesti Srácok and their “diverse sources”

“Our funding came from a pretty diverse range of sources,” Gergely Huth, editor-in-chief of Pesti Srácok told Telex without batting an eye in July at the Tusványos Summer University, when we asked him how much government funding their paper had received in the past years. Huth claimed that he had no information on the paper's recent financial background, as he only had insight into that prior to 2022.

So we took a look at the year 2021. According to data from the Opten company database, Insider Média Kft. (the outlet’s publisher at the time) closed out that year with a net revenue of 653 million forints (€1,799,004.55) and a loss of 8.7 million forints. The database of the Prime Minister’s Office shows that in that same year, a total of 504 million forints (€1,388, 355,70) gross was spent on 34 advertising campaigns on pestisracok.hu. This amounts to 345 million forints (€950 thousand) net (of which 59 million forints went to Gyula Balásy’s pocket) and shows that

in 2021, more than half of Pesti Srácok’s revenue came from advertisements placed by a single ministry.

It is difficult to judge how overpriced these advertisements were. According to the official audience measurement data from Gemius, in 2023–24, the site’s traffic remained fairly stable, ranging between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors per day. Although there is no public data available for the years before that, we can assume that the figures were roughly the same then too. The data shows that ads were not priced per impression but ran at daily or weekly rates. The average list price for a banner ad was roughly 500,000 forints (€1,377) per day, plus VAT. Based on that figure alone, it’s hard to say exactly how many people each ad reached, but the experts we interviewed—who are very familiar with the online advertising market—said that this price was “probably very overpriced.”

Magyar Hírlap-a perfectly pointless waste of money

Magyar Hírlap ceased publication as a print daily in the summer of 2022, but by that time there had long been no official data on its circulation figures; the publisher had stopped having its circulation audited as early as 2014, when the paper sold 7,800 copies daily; by the early 2020s—the period for which we have advertising data—according to industry estimates, this figure may have declined, at best, to around 2,500–3,000 copies per day.

As for the readership of the online publication, the 2021 annual report of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) lists a daily average of 12,500 readers, the 2022 report lists 10,200, while in 2023 this jumps to 63,100; and from then on, we also have official data from Gemius’s audience measurement: 180,000 in 2024, back down to 60,000 in 2025, and just 10,000 in the first half of 2026. Then, in July 2026, the monitoring of readership numbers was discontinued.

Meanwhile, in 2021, the list price for their most common ad type (a 1,100x350-resolution video banner on the homepage) was exactly the same (4.26 million forints plus VAT per week) as in 2024, despite having 18 times the daily readership.

We only have general traffic data for the site, and the ads ran in specific locations (the front page, certain sections of articles), so we don’t know exactly how many times they appeared. However, we did find a campaign from 2023 in which, between November 21 and December 11, an ad commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Office ran simultaneously on the front page of magyarhirlap.hu and in articles across 23 (!) separate columns. The topic was the national consultation taking place at the time. Based on this, it is safe to say that the entire newspaper was plastered with these ads, and according to the data from Gemius for this period: during the time in question, the number of daily readers averaged around 100,000, and there were 180,000 clicks across the entire site.

This means that the same ad was shown on each page and in every advertisement slot of the publication. According to one of the experts we spoke with, an advertiser buying up every page of an entire newspaper, wall-to-wall, for three weeks is “completely unnecessary—a perfectly pointless waste of money.”

According to advertising industry experts we interviewed, at these prices and with such readership figures, this campaign was roughly 15 times more expensive than it should have been. Additionally, the ministry advertised on the site for the same price regardless of whether it was reaching 10,000 daily readers or 100,000.

Over a period of just over four years, Rogán’s ministry purchased advertisements from the three outlets for just over 6 billion forints (€16,5 million) of which 4.1 billion (€11,3 million) actually went to the publishers. During peak times, the shared reach of these three publications—even when generously estimated and elegantly disregarding cross-readership— was perhaps a quarter of that of Hungary’s leading news outlets, but in some years it was closer to a tenth. Yet they managed to rake in as much money in advertisements from a single source as a major news site generates from all its advertisers over a period of 2–3 years.

It is clear in the case of all three newspapers that roughly half of the publisher’s revenue came from this single source—propaganda advertisements from the Prime Minister’s Office—which were generally priced at extremely inflated rates and took up a significant portion of the newspapers’ advertising space. What's more, this was by no means their only source of state funding—and they certainly didn't rely on the market for the other half of their revenue either, since there were plenty of other state advertisers spending billions or tens of billions of forints annually during these years. This included other ministries, Szerencsejáték Zrt., MVM, the Hungarian Tourism Agency, and so on.

For anyone wondering why the Fidesz media empire began to collapse so soon after the change in government, the answer is simple: the money needed to keep it running has dried up.

The ex-wife’s tabloid

Among the many hard-to-explain anomalies in the Hungarian media landscape over the past decade and a half, there is one more story worth mentioning: the success of the tabloid website twn.hu, which, despite publishing completely run-of-the-mill content with negligible readership, has been able to make an inexplicably large amount of money. According to its official financial reports, the company managed to operate with a profit margin of over 80 percent, allowing its owners to withdraw nearly a billion forints (€2 million 761 thousand) in profits each year.

Figuring out the secret behind this business miracle is easier if one knows that the majority owner of the paper is Cecília Rogán-Szendrei, the ex-wife of Orbán’s former cabinet minister Antal Rogán, as well as that the site was regularly flooded with the government’s advertisements. Incidentally, the outlet was launched in 2019, the year the Rogáns divorced.

Between January 2020 and March 2024, the National Communications Office purchased advertising space for a total of 53 campaigns on twn.hu; in 2021, which was the busiest year, materials for 19 campaigns were published on the site. These campaigns typically ran for periods ranging between a few weeks to more than a month.

Based on the information in the now publicly available database, the industry professionals Telex consulted estimated that twn.hu charged the ministry at least five times the realistic market price for the ads on their site.

Over the course of just over four years, the ministry spent a total of 158 million forints gross on advertising on twn.hu. After deducting VAT and New Land’s commission, this amounted to 108 million forints paid to the publisher, Top News Hungary Kft., owned by Cecília Rogán-Szendrei and Kata Sarka. However, over the course of the slightly more than four years in question, the tabloid generated more than 5 billion forints in net revenue (of which approximately 4 billion represent earnings after taxes, which the owners withdrew from the company as dividends). This means that the source of approximately 98 percent of this fairy-tale-like revenue remains unknown.

All the articles published about twn.hu in recent years highlighted that almost all the ads on the site were government ads. Of course, at this point it is not possible to determine how many of these were placed by Rogán’s office and how many came from elsewhere—but since only a negligible portion of the revenue came from the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, which was considered a major advertiser during the Orbán era, it seems likely that other government entities accounted for the majority of the remaining amount. The other potential explanation is that the remaining one billion forints TWN made each year came from a source unrelated to advertising—an activity unique to this media outlet alone.

As a bonus experiment, we asked one of Telex’s ad sales representatives to look into how much automatic online ad service systems are charging for ad space on twn.hu. Of course, this is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, since these solutions generally deal with advertising formats that aren’t as flashy—or as expensive—as the ones purchased by the Prime Minister’s Office, but it does show how much it costs to advertise on the site, using market-based pricing. At the beginning of August 2026, the price was 4–20 euro cents on a CPM basis, meaning the system charged between 15 and 75 forints per thousand impressions.

Antal Rogán’s office, however, was paying 10,000 forints per thousand impressions, on top of which came Gyula Balásy’s 15 percent commission, plus VAT.

Setting aside the content of the propaganda ads and the fact that this was basically about using public funds to support a single political party’s constant campaign, what ultimately happened was that the ministry spent a great deal of money to get its message across to the public, and New Land Media handled this with very, very poor efficiency. The job of this agency would have theoretically been to apply its knowledge and experience in the advertising and media markets—in exchange for a commission—and to optimize the delivery of the advertisements to the target audience. By all indications,—at least as far as these three papers and the 6 billion forints are concerned—Gyula Balásy’s company executed this extremely poorly, yet for some reason neither the Prime Minister’s Office, which commissioned the work, nor the State Audit Office (ÁSZ) and the Government Control Office (KEHI), which oversee the ministries’ financial management, found anything objectionable about it.