Quick blog post in response to news from Northcliffe House this morning.
The London Evening Standard is to go free from 12 October. Brand Republic says so.
At a time when newspaper circulation figures are in decline and the industry is grabbling to figure out how to generate income from online content it makes no sense whatsoever.
MD Andrew Mullins signals a change of business model. He says that it will up its circulation from 200,000 to 600,000.
“Being a quality newspaper with large scale and reach should transform our commercial fortunes.”
Presumably this is in a bid to bring back high spending advertisers and bulk up classified ads. But I can’t see the revenues being sufficient to turn a profit.
I’m going to dig up the numbers over the weekend but the only way I can see this working is if it Russian owner Alexander Lebedev is prepared to bank roll the Evening Standard through the turmoil in medialand.
But that’s not a new business model. It’s vanity publishing.
Update: The FT’s Ben Fenton has more detail to the Evening Standard announcement and the background to the London media landscape.
Given the Standard has long been the Daily Mail in disguise, accusations of vanity publishing could have been levelled for some time.
It is not such a great surprise – certainly not vanity publishing. Could even make money.
For most publishers, newsstand sales are a very small part of their revenue. We had a great discussion about this earlier in the week at our Future of Publishing Discussion Dinner. Thought you might be interested in some of the thoughts of other publishers. http://thebln.com/2009/10/why-free-is-no-big-deal-for-the-evening-standard/