Does the 25- to 49-year-old female commuter need another free daily in her life?

Sun Media says she does – and is betting that 24 hours, its latest foray into the Toronto transit newspaper wars, can meet her needs in a way that transit tab leader Metro can not.

‘We don’t see ourselves going toe-to-toe with Metro,’ says Bob Harris, Sun Media’s VP of new business development and the publisher of 24 hours, which debuted Nov. 3. ‘They do a great job with the 18-to-34 demo, and we’re hoping to do a great job with 25-to-49s.’

But while it’s true that about 35% of Metro’s readers are in the 18-to-34 age bracket, the new entry still needs to steal share from the leader, as females 25-to-49 currently make up almost a third (28.7%) of Metro’s readership.

Not only that, but according to the recently released January-to-June Toronto NADbank numbers, Metro’s period-on-period readership grew by 20% over the past year (see chart below), pushing it ahead of the National Post to become Toronto’s fourth most widely read newspaper.

Nonetheless, Harris, who was Metro’s director of sales and marketing before joining Sun Media in August, says 24 hours’ look, feel, and size will draw Metro’s female 25-to-49 readers along with other consumers who don’t currently pay for a daily newspaper.

‘We feel that it straddles two or three worlds,’ says Harris. ‘It’s a daily newspaper, but it also has some qualities of a news magazine and its content almost has the form and function of electronic media, in that the stories are like sound bites.’

Printed in full-colour on a glossy-like stock, 24 hours features plenty of graphic elements and short, punchy news items à la USA Today.

With a daily circulation of 225,000, the new paper is available via 2,000 bright orange boxes located outside subway stations and businesses targeted at women, including fitness centres, shopping malls and grocery stores.

Meanwhile last month in Montreal, Sun Media relaunched its existing French-language transit tab Montréal Métropolitain as 24 heures to compete with Metro’s Montreal counterpart, Métro. (Métro is owned by Publications Métropolitaines, a partnership between Transcontinental Media, Metro International and Gesca.)

In Toronto, Metro has been quietly girding itself for 24 hours’ arrival.

Along with increasing its print run from 200,000 to 225,000 earlier this month, the paper introduced a redesign this past Thanksgiving, and has been adding more lifestyle news that appeals to women through its MetroScene section.

‘We’ve been here for three years now, and we have become a part of the lives of a lot of Torontonians,’ says publisher Greg Lutes, who adds: ‘I don’t think they’re going to stop reading Metro now, just because there’s a new product in town.’

Indeed, many are asking why 24 hours will succeed when Sun Media’s previous crack at the transit tab market – FYI Toronto, launched in June 2000 and dead by summer 2001 – failed.

’24 hours in and of itself is a completely different product from FYI,’ says Harris, noting that FYI was a Sun extension, designed to push readers to the mother paper. ‘This time we’re set up as an independent company,’ he says, and the new paper’s target demo is as far removed from the Sun’s male skew as one can get.

Another count against the new tab is that unlike Metro, 24 hours does not have distribution within TTC subway and GO stations. But Harris does not see this as a disadvantage.

‘The fact is that almost 50% of Metro’s distribution is through the subway and that tends to reflect readers who are younger, usually 18 to 34,’ he says. The new paper will have a leg up in the outlying areas of the GTA, where 24 has much greater presence than Metro does, he adds. Roughly 30% of the new paper’s boxes are located in Durham, Peel and York, whereas only 10% of Metro’s drop points (primarily GO stations) are in those regions.

But despite Sun Media’s aggressive distribution strategy, Toronto media buyers are unanimously skeptical about 24’s chance of success.

‘With FYI they’ve already proven that there’s not enough room for another transit paper,’ says Dave Crammond, managing partner at Toronto-based Mediaedge:cia. That Metro has had the field to itself for the last two years and has only recently begun to attract major national advertisers, like Dell computers and Bell, for example, is further evidence, says Crammond, that there aren’t the ad dollars to support a second free daily.

Sarah Ivey, VP of strategic planning at Toronto’s Initiative Media, agrees that Metro is too entrenched in the market for 24 to make a difference.

‘It’s so hard to unseat a market leader, especially one that’s on a roll like Metro is.’