Analyzing Patterns and Influence of Advertising in Print Newspapers
N Harsha Vardhan, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Kiran Garimella
TL;DR
This paper presents a scalable, data-driven pipeline to extract and analyze print newspaper advertising from Indian epapers using image processing and OCR across five papers in English, Hindi, and Telugu, assembling a dataset of 12,358 editions and hundreds of thousands of ads. It demonstrates a high-accuracy segmentation model (YOLOv8s) and a multilingual OCR/translation system to identify ads and articles, enabling large-scale analyses of who advertises, what they advertise, when, where, and how. Key findings show government ads dominate expenditure with broad page distribution, while corporate ads favor premium placements and larger sizes; regression analyses reveal that corporate advertising correlates with more favorable and extensive coverage, whereas government advertising shows a weaker or negative relationship with sentiment. The work provides open-source code and data, offering a valuable resource for studying media integrity, advertiser influence, and cross-media comparisons in a multilingual, real-world setting.
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.