In India, much of the available information about the media industry, such as details of viewership, circulation, and editorial and business practices, is fragmented and incomplete. Partly as a result, there are few rigorous surveys or studies of the media.

However, there are some publicly available data sets that can be productively mined for insights. For this year’s media issue, we extracted data from two sources: the Department of Advertising and Visual Publicity, or the DAVP, and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. We used these data to explore some trends in government advertising spend, and in newspaper revenue at five of the country’s largest dailies. The results of the DAVP analysis suggest that the government’s advertising spend is heavily skewed towards targeting a small, elite section of the population. The MCA data, meanwhile, suggest that commercial interests, such as expanding investment portfolios and advertising revenues, may dominate editorial considerations in some of our leading publications.





1/ THE DAVP SPEND