“We give a platform to small retail advertisers who can’t afford to advertise in the big papers,” says Vikas Chandra, the project head for City Plus. According to Siddharth Gupta, chief operating officer of Daily Page Pvt. Ltd, Neighbourhood Flash’s publisher, the paper mostly attracts “sub-local advertising”. It mostly comes from “local schools, hospitals, salons, gyms, beauty products, apparel retailers”.
Meanwhile, the advertiser profile of free dailies—or least the ads they hope to attract—isn’t very different from the “paid” dailies.
Metro International, the Swedish group that is the global market leader in free dailies—it publishes 84 editions in 19 languages across 23 countries—counts many traditional print marquee brands, such as Canon, Nokia, Puma and Samsung, among its advertisers.
Over in Chennai, a Kasturi and Sons executive says Ergo plans to tap the same set of advertisers that mainstream paid dailies vie for. “There is interest from advertisers as we are doing a controlled distribution in a clearly targeted IT corridor,” says N. Murali, Kasturi’s joint managing director. “We are hoping to get banks, automobiles, telecom and gadget companies to advertise with us,” he adds.
In a controlled distribution model, the publisher decides which neighbourhoods or office buildings will get the paper delivered, thus hoping to create a critical mass of certain kinds of households or readers that advertisers would pay to reach, and the ability to charge more than, say, the community-based free papers.
Indeed, the rate card charge per sq. cm colour ad in all editions of Neighbourhood Flash is Rs300. The corresponding figure for City Plus, in and around New Delhi, is Rs150 per sq. cm while Ergo says it charges Rs200 per sq. cm. In comparison, the Capital edition of The Times of India (ToI), circulated in New Delhi and its neighbouring areas, charges Rs1,632 for the same space. According to the latest data from Indian Readership Survey, ToI enjoys a readership of 2.13 million in New Delhi. Readership surveys do not cover free newspapers such as Neighbourhood Flash.
Murali says free papers don’t have to be mass papers to generate ad revenue, adding: “Advertisers will test the response they get anyway.”
Indeed, some advertisers are saying it doesn’t matter to them if a paper is free or paid.
“Advertisers are only interested in eyeballs,” says Sam Balsara, chairman of the Madison Group. “With the readership of regular dailies stagnating, if not declining, new ways of reaching readers have to be found (so) the launch of free dailies was inevitable. As for advertising, if consumers read the paper, ad bucks will follow. Whether it is paid or free is immaterial.”
The free newspaper market in India is still too small to have reliable data on how much advertising it is starting to attract. But India’s overall print media continues to grow rapidly in terms of its ability to attract advertising.
According to AdEx India, a division of Mumbai-based research agency TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd, print advertising grew 21% during January-September 2007 over the same period in 2005. TAM measures ad growth in terms of column inches.