More than 25 Million Free Dailies Now Distributed in 38 Countries

And as good an example as any of why there has been such growth comes today in Switzerland when the country’s largest publishing house, Ringier, owner of Blick, the largest paid-for circulation newspaper in the country, launches the free afternoon paper Heute (Today) in the German speaking part of the country.

Blick has had its nose bloodied for the past couple of years by the free 20 Minutes that now has sailed way ahead of Blick in readership. Blick tried just about everything it could to stop the rot, including turning itself into a tabloid, but 20 Minutes has seemingly gone from strength to strength with Blick languishing far behind.

So today Ringier launches Heute with an initial press run of 200,000 with distribution in three major cities – Zurich, Bern, and Basle. In what could be recognition of 20 Minutes strength Heute goes out in the afternoon to catch the commuter on the way home, whereas 20 Minutes catches the commuter on the way to work in the morning.

Ringier has some experience from its East European activities with free newspapers. It got its feet wet just last November in Prague with the launch of 24hodin and earlier this month it launched Compact in Bucharest with a print run of 150,000 expected to garner 300,000 daily readers. Ringier paid-for tabloids are number one in five East European countries -- The Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia.

Elsewhere in Switzerland, Edipresse and Tamedia are still locking horns in the French-speaking part of the country. Lausanne-based Edipresse considers the French-speaking part of Switzerland its home turf and it launched the free Le Matin Bleu in October last year after it heard that Tamedia, the 20 Minutes brand holder in Switzerland having bought out Schibsted, was going to trespass from German-speaking Switzerland. Tamedia launched its French language edition of 20 Minutes in March, and both are distributed from similar looking blue boxes.

There are days when the front pages of both tabloids look virtually the same – same layout, same main story, with picture below on a different subject, but both choosing the same subject for that picture. Maybe both staffs went to the same training courses for free newspapers!

Difficult to tell who is winning the war, but mid-afternoon visits to the main Geneva distribution point – the central railway station where each newspaper has multiple boxes – continually shows the Le Matin Bleu boxes all empty, whereas the 20 Minutes boxes still are about one-quarter full. Whether that is because 20 Minutes is placing more papers in its boxes or Le Matin Bleu is just more popular will have to wait for official audit numbers.

ftm background

Can A Metropolitan PM Stem Circulation Losses And Grow The Business Using What It Admits Is A “Radical” Solution By Giving Itself Away Downtown But Continuing To Be A Paid-For Elsewhere?
The UKs Manchester Evening News has tried just about everything to stop the rot – widening its distribution area but that increased the cost per copy, starting a successful Lite edition but still the classifieds flowed to the Internet, reorganizing editorial to cut some 20% of its editorial staff to reduce costs, but it wasn’t enough. So now it is pushing the envelope where none other has dared to tread – it is giving away downtown what it sells elsewhere.

All Fall Down – Internet Levels Spanish Media, Except Free Sheets
The internet marches on in Spain, attracting more and more daily use, according to the Estudio General de Medios (EGM) report. Television, radio, magazines, weekly newspapers and cinema have declined in daily or weekly use. And, for the first time in five years daily newspaper use does not grow. Worst hit was cinema attendance, falling to 7.1% from 11% in 2001.

Three Different Approaches By UK Nationals to Stem Steep Circulation Losses: Daily Star, Daily Express -- Lower the Newsstand Price And Up the Brand Advertising; Daily Mirror, Guardian and the Independent -- Raise the Cover Price; Observer -- Go Compact. And All Seem to Work!
The year-on-year circulation numbers for the UK nationals show circulation down although all had a good 2006 start in January. But how to stem the overall losses? Two pricing ideas are now in play – raise the cover price and lower the cover price. The third option is to resize, and the January ABCs seem to indicate that everything can work.

European Free Newspaper Market Share Ranges from 72% in Iceland to Just 6% in Austria, But Already Free Newspapers are Circulation Leaders In Spain and Switzerland With More Free Newspapers Coming
Iceland, a country with just under 300,000 population has a battle royal going on between free newspapers. Frettabladid, which has been around four years, leads with 99,000 mostly home delivered copies daily, and Bladid, a free mail-delivered tabloid that started in May this year, distributes 80,000. That means enough free newspapers are available to satisfy about 64% of Iceland’s total population.

London Gets a New Free Financial Daily That Distributes At the End of the Commute While In Geneva, Where There Is No Free Daily, The Tribune de Genève Tries to Persuade Readers It Is Not a Freebie
With the Financial Times seeing its UK circulation hovering around 121,000 and if anything decreasing the last thing it really needs is a new free financial tabloid newspaper distributing some 60,000 copies in the city’s major financial centers and aiming to get those numbers up to 100,000 within three months.

Bakker points out that that reaching the 10 million global distribution in 2001 took just six years, and yet now the 25 million mark has been toppled in just five additional years.

Established paid-for players are actively involved in the free newspaper business. Perhaps the best example is in the UK where the Daily Mail & Trust prints the Metro newspapers (no connection to the Swedish company) in several cities and is said to be making about £10 profit per reader this year. The fact that Ringier has a dominant position in its East European markets hasn’t stopped it from launching free dailies in two of those markets within the past six months.

Advertisers are being offered cross-market packages – with the web sites of the free newspapers and also with their paid-for publications.

And whereas most free newspapers are given out in the morning to catch the commuter going to work, the PM market is now gaining more interest, not only with Heute in Switzerland, but in London where the city is seeking bids for a PM franchise to use public transport areas for distribution, even using the same boxes as Metro uses in the morning.

In the US, the Examiner tabloids in Washington and Baltimore are targeting home delivery to the neighborhoods advertisers are most interested in.

And in Manchester, UK, where the Evening News is trying to have the best of both worlds – free and paid-for. In addition to its current 130,000 paid copies the newspaper is giving away 50,000 copies downtown. There has been no change to the advertising rates, but the Audit Bureau of Circulation has reclassified the newspaper as “free”.

What publishers around the world will be looking at, of course, is whether it will also be classified as profitable!