Many industry players have made rosy predictions on advertising growth in the near future. It is not surprising then that Kasturi plans to take Ergo to other markets in due course. “We chose to launch Ergo in Chennai because it is our home market,” says Murali. Indeed, The Hindu is the largest circulated newspaper in Chennai. “As a test market, it is easier for us to handle. Depending on its success (in Chennai), we might think about other cities with high concentration of IT professionals, such as Bangalore and Hyderabad.”
Murali denied the timing of Ergo’s launch had anything to do with the reported plans for a Chennai edition of ToI. “ToI’s coming has been in the air for the past couple of years. Now it’s more concrete, it is clear that they are coming in 2008, but Ergo’s launch doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he says.
In addition to trying to get more ad dollars with such flanking moves, some Indian publishers see an emerging opportunity in the growing trend, at least in large cities, of more people using more comfortable public transport, such as metro trains and buses that run in dedicated corridors.
This means free papers not only have a regular—and captive—audience, but such transport systems also become relatively easy ways to distribute their paper, often from kiosks set up at the entrance, with one outsourced employee making sure copies are not pilfered en masse by competition or, especially in India, for recycling.
“Public transport is by far the most efficient way to distribute (free papers),” says Bakker.
Indeed, cities such as London have seen new free papers emerge just to serve the tube, as the London metro is informally called. Even Metro International has flourished by initially focusing on urban train commuters in European cities.
In India, mass rapid transit systems are in various stages of conception and execution in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kochi, while the Delhi Metro continues to expand its reach and its riders. Chennai already has one that runs along the IT corridor in the southern part of the city.
“We are studying the needs of the metro commuters,” says Sanjay Gupta, CEO of Jagran Prakashan. “We have been talking to the Delhi Metro” to explore distribution.
But some large media houses say they don’t see much of a future in free dailies, at least for now. “It’s another way of marketing your product. We don’t have any plans as of now,” says Ravi Dhariwal, CEO of Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd (BCCL), the publisher of ToI. Tariq Ansari, the managing director of Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd, the publisher of the tabloid Mid-Day, also said his company has no plans for free papers.
A spokesperson for Metro International declined to comment on whether the company is scouting for a partner in India to launch a paper here.
And some media experts say the success of free newspapers outside India is unlikely to be replicated here.
“There is only a vague chance that such dailies will work in India,” says Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd CEO Pradeep Guha, who spent 29 years in the print industry, rising to become president of BCCL. He is also a director at Diligent Media Corp. Ltd, the publisher of DNA.