Who still advertises in Australian Newspapers?

Data compiled by Canda Media Intelligence for 2025 shows that metropolitan newspapers remain a trusted channel for a very specific set of advertisers: those targeting older, wealthier, locally rooted audiences making high-consideration or planned purchases. Instead of mass youth brands or fast-fashion e-commerce, spend concentrates in travel, furniture and homewares, supermarkets and department stores, government messaging, wagering and finance. These are marketers that need reach into established households, retirees and community decision-makers, and who value the credibility and “lean-in” reading mode of print news environments. Their offers are often complex, time-bound (sales, tours, events) or geographically specific, which fits the format and targeting strengths of metropolitan titles.

Category rankings

Travel and accommodation is clearly the number one newspaper category, accounting for the largest share of spend; roughly one in every three dollars placed in metro press goes to travel, and travel agents alone contribute well over twice the weight of the next-largest single category. Retail is ranked number two, driven by department stores, which on their own account for around a quarter of all top-category spend and sit only slightly behind travel agents in relative weight. Behind these two giants, consumer electronics and politics are ranked three and four respectively, each contributing only a fraction of the share commanded by the top two categories and together sitting at under a fifth of the combined weight of travel agents and department stores. Supermarkets hold the number five position, with the rest of the top 10 rounded out by home-focused segments (kitchenware and homewares), health and beauty retail, drinks retail and gambling, each only contributing single-digit percentages relative to the dominant top two.

Advertiser rankings

Advertiser rankings show an even more concentrated picture. Harvey Norman sits at number one by a very clear margin, accounting by itself for a high-teens percentage of total spend among the top advertisers and outspending the second-ranked travel advertiser by roughly a factor of two. The next tier — dominated by travel brands such as Ignite Travel and Inspiring Vacations — occupies ranks two and three and together forms another sizeable slice of the market, though still notably below Harvey Norman’s share. From rank four onwards, individual advertiser shares drop sharply: brands like Domayne, Qantas, JB Hi-Fi and Luxury Escapes represent only a small single-digit percentage of top-advertiser spend.

Australian newspapers are now anchored by a handful of very heavy travel and retail users, which together account for the majority of spend in the medium. Below them sits a diverse but more fragmented set of categories — electronics, government and politics, supermarkets, home and garden, drinks and gambling — that collectively contribute a meaningful minority share but are individually much smaller. In practice, the advertisers who still meaningfully back Australian metropolitan newspapers are chiefly large travel marketers, big-box and supermarket retailers, and a compact group of household-name brands in finance, entertainment, gambling, automotive and government. Everyone else appears in much smaller proportions, using newspapers tactically rather than as a dominant channel, while print itself has shifted from default mass medium to a specialised, high-trust component of the media mix that offers credibility, attention, detailed display space and local context that are hard to replicate at scale in purely digital environments.