The growth of digital and print media, the rise in revenues and the sheer amount of newspapers that circulate daily in the world’s second-most populous nation all make for a striking picture. To help understand just how big this boom has been, and indeed why it’s happening at all, here’s a quick guide to India’s complex media world.

The boom

As of last year, India had more than 94,000 registered newspapers, according to a recent report by KPMG, an audit and advisory firm. Not only is that an amount that dwarfs the U.S. — which as of 2011 had fewer than 14,000 registered newspapers — but it’s also a figure that has nearly doubled from just 10 years prior, when there were about 55,000 registered Indian papers.

In the past year alone, revenues for newspapers in India experienced 8.7 percent growth, even as venerated institutions like The New York Times have continued to gut their newsrooms.

Part of the reason for India’s robust print industry is that in many parts of the country, especially the rural regions, Internet connectivity is still a development issue. Only 3 percent of Indians say they have home Internet access, in large part because of a lack of infrastructure.

That’s not to say that Indians aren’t online — just that many of them are getting access through wireless connections and mobile networks. According to the KPMG report, of the 214 million Internet users in India, 130 million, or about 61 percent, get access through mobile. The report predicts that mobile users will top 350 million by the end of 2018 — about 71 percent of what is by then expected to be a total of 494 million Internet users.

In January, The Guardian reported that 225 million smartphones were expected to be sold in India in 2014, with a greater proportion of those going to new users than anywhere else in the world. Those new Internet users may pose a problem for print, but to big media groups moving online, they’re just potential customers via a different medium.