"The Czech media landscape is characterised by the dominance of commercial television, which attracts nearly half of the total advertising spend, and by a highly concentrated newspaper sector, mostly in the hands of local business tycoons," Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017 says. 

The continued growth of the Czech advertising market has significantly gathered pace in the last year, climbing by 15% in 2016. This was mainly due to rising spend on TV (+19%). However, online ad spending has grown the fastest (+31%), surpassing print for the first time and increasing its overall share of the advertising market to 21%.

Czech online users’ news habits have not changed dramatically in the past year, although the computer is gradually becoming less dominant among the devices used to access news. Tablet use or news consumption remains low and stagnating, a tendency which most likely contributed to the closure of the first Czech tablet weekly Dotyk in 2016. 

As for people who say they have made an ‘ongoing payment (subscription) for a digital news service’ in the last year, as these are often the most lucrative for publishers, payment figures tend to be higher in Nordic countries like Denmark (10%), Sweden (12%), and Norway (15%). However, they fall to just 2% in Greece and the Czech Republic. Similarly, just 3% in the UK paid for an ongoing news subscription in the last year. Willingness to pay for online news continues to be among the lowest in Europe. This is certainly both the cause and the consequence of the fact that the majority of Czech online news content remains free. Most content producers are wary of discouraging users with hard paywalls, and instead experiment with freemium models.

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