Telex breaks all previous records in month of election

Everything revolved around the parliamentary elections in Hungary during April, and the viewership of online videos and programs soared to unprecedented heights. During the month of the regime change, Telex's channel was the most visited one among audiences in Hungary; with over 40 million views, our channel became the country's most-watched news channel on YouTube, according to data from StarNetwork.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but in the month of the election:

• Captain Szilveszter Pálinkás first spoke up on our channel about the conditions in the Hungarian armed forces.
• During the final stretch of the campaign, we conducted a live interview with Péter Magyar.
• On April 12, we provided coverage of the day of the regime change in our most extensive election program to date.
• We showed how Fidesz deceived its own voters.
• We reported live on the historic day when the leader of the victorious party, Péter Magyar spoke on public media, met with the President of the Republic, and the outgoing Orbán government held its final meeting.
• We showed how thousands of citizens and activists took down Fidesz’s vote-buying machinery.
• We conducted a more than 3-hour, live interview with outgoing Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.
• The incoming Minister of Transport, Dávid Vitézy, gave his first interview to our channel.

Since Telex was launched, we have been constantly developing our video department, and in recent years we have placed more and more emphasis on building and expanding our studio. As a technical genre, both of these are among the most expensive segments of journalism; and it is only thanks to the support of our readers and donors that we are able to make these reports and interviews happen.

April was not only a good month for our video channel, but for our news site, Telex.hu as well, which also dominated election day, with high readership figures continuing throughout the entire month. Based on the aggregated Gemius data for April, Telex was the most-read news portal in Hungary: with 3,037,628 monthly unique visitors (RU) and a daily average of 897,167, we lead the Hungarian market.

It sends a particularly strong signal that we’ve not only become number one in terms of reach but also in terms of attention: among news sites, readers spent the most time on Telex on a monthly basis. This shows that readers not only click on our articles but also read them through and then return to the site; in the long run, this speaks even more to a publication’s strength than one-off traffic spikes.

Even after reaching these record numbers, we have no intention of stopping; we want to continue to improve, and we will have plenty to do in the historic period ahead of us. For this reason, we would like to ask our readers and viewers to become regular supporters of Telex and to help our editorial team continue its work by donating 1% of their taxes.