The Czech advertising market entered 2025 in its best macroeconomic shape in years. GDP grew 2.6%, driven mainly by household spending, while real wages were up 5.1% year-on-year in the final quarter. After a long stretch of inflation-driven caution, advertisers loosened up too: total marketing-communication investment reached CZK 164.8 billion, roughly 10% more than the year before and a clear step up from 2024’s modest 3.3% growth.
The story of the year, though, was political. October’s parliamentary elections brought Andrej Babiš’s ANO back to power with 34.5% of the vote, on the highest turnout this century, at just under 69%. The campaign saturated every channel for months, and “volby” ended up as the single most-trending search term of the Czech year on Google. The consequences for public media arrived almost immediately: the incoming ANO-led coalition announced plans to scrap the licence fee and fund Czech Television and Czech Radio from the state budget, prompting warnings from journalists and media experts that the broadcasters’ independence was at stake. President Petr Pavel struck a more measured note, arguing that the funding mechanism itself matters less than firm guarantees against political interference.
Structurally, the defining move came in March, when PPF merged its two video services, Voyo and O2 TV, into a single platform called Oneplay. Within two months, it had around 1.4 million subscribers, overtaking Netflix on the Czech market, and by December, the launch was prominent enough to rank third among the country’s trending searches of the year. TV Nova then took full ownership of O2 TV at the end of the year and expanded its sports rights, leaving PPF firmly in control of premium video. For anyone planning paid video, the inventory map looks different than it did twelve months ago.
Ownership kept moving in publishing as well. In November, energy billionaire Pavel Tykač agreed to buy a 50% stake in Mafra, home of Mladá fronta Dnes and iDNES, the latest instance of Czech industrial capital buying into media. Meanwhile, Seznam.cz, still the only domestic digital platform of real scale, faces the same headwind as every publisher: Google’s AI Overviews, joined by AI Mode in October, have been cutting search traffic to Czech sites. Lifestyle magazines, auto-moto, and sport titles lost the most, down 40–75% year-on-year, while news sites held up comparatively well at around minus 7%, a quirk of Google having switched off extended snippets in Czechia back in 2023. The industry body SPIR considers the threat serious enough that it is weighing a complaint to the regulator.
Online took roughly three-quarters of net media spend, around EUR 2.86 billion. Telecom (+19% year-on-year), financial services (+11%), and leisure and entertainment (+11%) were the fastest-growing advertiser categories; clothing (-14%), tourism (-10%), and soft drinks (-9%) cut back the most. Influencer spend reached an estimated EUR 36 million, still a small slice of the total but by now a routine line in brand plans rather than an experiment.
Three forces are pulling on the Czech market as 2026 begins: AI-driven disruption of digital publishing, political pressure on public media, and consolidation in streaming.
