madcomments

Metro marches on

Posted in Media, Branwell Johnson, Latest reporters' blogs August 28th, 2007 by Branwell Johnson

Metro shows no signs of slowing down its growth. The newspaper has just added another 250,000 copies to its circulation, saying it is meeting demand from advertisers. What a good place to be and a problem no doubt the afternoon free sheets would love to have.

It’s hard to imagine a time when Metro was not present to occupy our journey to work and stop us falling asleep or gazing vacantly at an out of date tube panel ad. However, it only launched in 1999 and pretty soon, under Mike Anderson’s guidance, it developed a sharp positioning (the “Metro moment”) and strategy to entice sales teams.

Now Anderson is at News International and working hard at pushing the newspaper brands and their content out across many platforms but the groundwork he laid at Metro has enabled the paper to go from strength to strength. The only real hurdle on the horizon is the renewal of the lucrative distribution contract with London Underground/Transport for London. There are three years left to run on the present contract but eyes must now be turning to the horizon to see if any competitors are steaming forward. 

The only real contender at the moment is News International’s thelondonpaper. Right now it’s an afternoon offering but any serious challenger for the contract will have to show a sustained business model and a quality product – arguably thelondonpaper at least has the latter part of this equation in place and has some time to work on the former. Any other publishers thinking of mounting a challenge for the contract must now be considering what they could offer. Or maybe Metro is in an impregnable position?

To read the news story related to this blog, go to mad.co.uk