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

The bulletin company publishing Top World News has been steadily generating revenues over HUF 1 billion a year. The company, 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 have taken out as dividends.

Last year, the company Top News Hungary generated HUF 1.1 billion profit after tax, almost 88 percent of its HUF 1.27 billion revenue. Most of this, more than 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, it cannot be a real economic performance. It is impossible to achieve such a result in the current Hungarian market and beyond” – told Ágnes Urbán, economist, university lecturer and researcher at the Mérték Media Analysis Workshop to 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. For example, Central Media Group, one of Hungary’s largest independent media companies has for years been able to generate a profit of up to 15-18% of its annual turnover of around HUF 13 billion. It is telling that last year their after-tax profit was HUF 2.3 billion, only twice as much as Rogán’s ex-wife’s company’s.

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

Since twn.hu is available to anyone, there is no subscriber content, so in principle advertising is its revenue source. 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 had not received a reply to our questions by the time this article was published.

Advertisements from the government’s circle

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 at the time, which were opposing sanctions against Russia and praised the price freeze and the cuts in the electricity bill. In 2022, the site also featured ads of the state-owned Szerencsejáték Plc. This company was owned 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 magazine 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 also found government advertising. An advertisement promoting the Gondosóra programme appeared several times. This is a government project funded by the European Union. Under the programme, elderly people over 65 are given a wrist-mounted emergency alarm device to call for immediate help in an emergency. According to information on the project website, the Gondosóra service is provided by 4iG, a company that has been helped in many ways by the Orbán government.

Government and government-related ads on twn.hu

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 company is under 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 its 20th of August events. The Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister headed by Antal Rogán is also responsible for government communications, and the Nemzeti Rendezvényszervező Ügynökség 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. The advertisement appearing on twn.hu does not mean directly that Top News Hungary Ltd. had a contract with the state or other advertisers, these advertisements, as well as 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. Google Ads also gives 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. Twn.hu has many and varied advertisements, but Vodafone’s advertisements were present in large numbers on the site during the period under review. There were days when almost every second article had an ad for the telecoms company underneath. The state acquired an ownership stake in Vodafone in early 2023, following together with a subsidiary of 4iG, acquired the Hungarian subsidiary of the telecoms giant, Vodafone Hungary Zrt., in a 51:49 ratio. “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 “today, only a small part of modern digital media buying is when advertisers buy media targeting specific sites”, and in fact “it almost doesn’t matter on which site the ad appears, as long as it is seen by a visitor who belongs to the supposed 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 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 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 became a majority by a 98.41% stake in a subsidiary of the pro-government Mathias Corvinus Collegium in the summer of 2023. MCC is a very big recipient of taxpayer money, having received 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.

Source of the news

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

But there is another source of audience for twn.hu. Readers can also reach the site if other, more popular newspapers link to the tabloid of Cecília Rogán-Gaál.

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

According to our current analysis, ATV continues to consider twn.hu as a relevant news source: this year alone, they have taken five materials from them, typically tabloid material that twn.hu has also linked 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 the wedding, the bride had nervous breakdown.”

The article cites as a source an article by twn.hu with a similar title, wich cites 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 moderate importance to Hungarian readers.

It is not only ATV that is trying to draw the attention of its audience to twn.hu. Rogán-Gaál’s tabloid also often refers to ATV, which is natural, since the TV channel’s website is a news portal. However, twn.hu does not only refer to ATV in news articles, but also regularly presents social media posts by 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, they reported about the new dog of one of the channel’s employees. Articles titled The aliens? Background powers?” – ATV presenter shocked when she turned on Netflix, or ATV presenter showed her love for the first time: a liver cream brought them together – Photo are actually available on the site.

Although ATV also gives space to opposition opinions, 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 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., Szilárd Sándor 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 institution you mentioned”, the press department of ATV said in response to our question, adding that “atv.hu constantly receives news from other media outlets with source identification, just as news of ATV are linked by many internet newspapers”. They added that “Sándor Szilárd Németh has no connection with the news portal and has no knowledge of its operation.”

In addition to ATV, Index.hu, a portal with close ties to the government, has also repeatedly marked twn.hu’s articles as 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, such titles were used to drive traffic to twn.hu: “Evelin’s videos on TikTok are really taking off: she makes herself up to look like a world star, 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 and laughing at the dog that turned into a mystical creature after being clipped”.

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. They have also published articles about eggs in the fridge door, the wreckage of the Titanic and a marriage with a goat.

Index replied to our questions 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 their role in this matter.

Graphic design: Virág Török/Telex