Analyzing Patterns and Influence of Advertising in Print Newspapers

TL;DR

This study employs a novel image processing pipeline to analyze print newspaper advertising patterns across India, revealing consistent ad levels, placement biases, and the influence of advertising on media coverage, based on a large multilingual dataset.

Contribution

It introduces a new data-driven methodology for extracting and analyzing print newspaper ads and provides comprehensive insights into advertising patterns and their influence on coverage.

Findings

Print advertising remained stable over six years despite circulation decline.

Company ads are often placed on prominent pages.

Government ads contribute disproportionately to revenue.

Abstract

This paper investigates advertising practices in print newspapers across India using a novel data-driven approach. We develop a pipeline employing image processing and OCR techniques to extract articles and advertisements from digital versions of print newspapers with high accuracy. Applying this methodology to five popular newspapers that span multiple regions and three languages, English, Hindi, and Telugu, we assembled a dataset of more than 12,000 editions containing several hundred thousand advertisements. Collectively, these newspapers reach a readership of over 100 million people. Using this extensive dataset, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to answer key questions about print advertising: who advertises, what they advertise, when they advertise, where they place their ads, and how they advertise. Our findings reveal significant patterns, including the consistent level of print advertising over the past six years despite declining print circulation, the overrepresentation of company ads on prominent pages, and the disproportionate revenue contributed by government ads. Furthermore, we examine whether advertising in a newspaper influences the coverage an advertiser receives. Through regression analyses on coverage volume and sentiment, we find strong evidence supporting this hypothesis for corporate advertisers. The results indicate a clear trend where increased advertising correlates with more favorable and extensive media coverage, a relationship that remains robust over time and across different levels of advertiser popularity.