‘If you pay for it, you’re more likely to read it.’

For years this argument has been put forward to advertisers and media buyers by paid circulation newspapers, and for years that argument worked.

Whether a newspaper is gratis or paid is certainly not the first question a media planner considers when choosing the best vehicle for a client – how closely the readership matches the target is the key. But given multiple choices that satisfy this prime requirement, whether a paper is paid or free is still a factor that can sway media choices.

In fact, ‘it’s more than a minor factor whether a publication is paid or not,’ says Ruth Smith, VP, media director at Axmith McIntyre Wicht, echoing a point of view held by many in her profession. ‘Advertisers and media planners prefer to use a paid publication all else being equal. And the reason for that is that paid publications tend to have higher readership and more regular readership.’

But over the last few years, free papers have grown in both number and respectability, and some buyers are beginning to question whether paid versus free should be a factor at all.

There are now literally thousands of freebies, with 700 or so falling into the community newspaper group, another batch in the alternative urban weekly group, and many others catering to specific demos, such as seniors or multicultural, on a weekly or monthly basis.

Then in June 2000, a whole new breed of free papers took Toronto by storm with the simultaneous launch of three free transit tabs, only one of which, Metro Toronto, survives today. Since then, the Montreal market has seen the launch of two transit tabs of its own, Transcontinental’s Métro and Quebecor’s Métropolitain.

But it was the launch and subsequent success of Metro Toronto, in particular, that challenged some of the traditional thinking among buyers when it comes to the paid versus free debate. Before Metro, it was generally accepted that dailies were paid and weeklies were largely free. Now there are both paid and free newspapers in both categories, making head-to-head comparison an easier and more relevant undertaking.

Greg Lutes, publisher of Metro Toronto, which is co-owned by Torstar and Stockholm-based Metro International SA, remembers the tough time his tab had getting buyers on board when the paper first launched.

‘I don’t know if it was a bias, or just media buyers being very cautious,’ he says, ‘but before we had any circulation numbers or readership numbers, it was very difficult to convince people to spend on us.’

With no buyers interested, at first the paper had to subsist on local retail, the same mom ‘n’ pop stores that have supported community papers since time immemorial. But then Metro had a breakthrough the likes of which no community paper has ever seen, and it had everything to do with proving that a free publication can get just as good a readership as paid.

What happened is that the transit tabs became the first free publications to join NADbank, and when the figures came out and showed that Metro, along with the two other subway papers, Sun Media’s FYI Toronto and Torstar’s GTA Today, accounted for half-a-million readers in the Toronto CMA on a five-day cume basis, buyers sat up and took notice. The latest NADbank numbers, out just last month, show that all by itself, Metro’s five-day cume in the Toronto CMA is now up to 649,600, soundly beating the National Post’s 520,800 and even challenging the Globe and Mail’s 850,900.

These aren’t the sort of numbers a community paper gets, and the buyers responded appropriately. Now Metro gets 40% of its ad revenue from national advertisers, says Lutes, and has even made inroads with big packaged goods marketers.

With readers per copy averaging 2.3, compared to, say, 5.4 (Monday to Friday) for the Toronto Sun (as measured by PMB), buyers’ belief that freebies get a lower readership for a given circulation has actually been borne out, but since buyers also know exactly what that readership is, says Toronto-based HYPN co-founder Rob Young, it hardly matters.

‘One of the misconceptions that buyers had is that controlled circulation publications have a lower number of readers than a paid circulation publication, so it’s not as good. Just by virtue of the fact that the readers per copy was lower,’ he says. ‘But if you look at a reader of a controlled circulation publication, compared to a reader of a paid circulation publication, you would find generally that they spend a similar amount of time with each, that their editorial quality scores are just as high – and their demography could even be better than that of a paid.’

Elena Dunn, Vancouver-based president of ComBase, which is currently in the process of executing Canada’s first independent national readership study for community papers, goes even further than that.

She says that a pilot study of five Canadian markets released in fall 2002 showed that there is no significant difference in readership between paid circulation community papers and freebies. She adds that when respondents were asked to rate the editorial quality, again, free versus paid didn’t make a difference.

The pilot was not designed to measure differences in readership for free versus paid per se, she says, but comparing numbers for the two groups shows the average issue readership for free publications (130+ measured) is 83.9%, compared to an average issue readership for the paids (10 measured) of 87.7%. The upshot is that the difference is pretty much negligible, and that, in fact, people are not more likely to read a community paper just because they paid for it.

‘I’ve heard that the media buyers feel that if it’s free it might not be read to the same extent as something that someone pays for,’ she says. ‘But the stats show that’s not true.’ She adds that she’ll likely have better numbers to back that up when the results of the national study come out in September.

This type of finding doesn’t surprise Grant Crosbie, ad director at Toronto’s NOW magazine. He notes that with an alt-weekly like NOW, readers are still making a conscious decision to pick up the paper, a decision that holds just as much bearing on whether that paper will be read as a decision to pay for a publication – maybe even more.

‘I understand the argument that if someone puts money down for something, they’re going to use it,’ he says. ‘However, a large portion of many paid circulation papers is paid subscriptions, and once paid for, it comes into the house continuously. And it just keeps coming, week after week. But do you have as much of an affinity for that publication as one that you go out of your way to pick up? I think that you could put forth a good argument that that’s not the case.’

To wit, he notes that NOW has an audited pick-up rate of 97% – a rate that any national paper would ‘salivate for’ in single-copy sales – and that NOW’s average time spent reading is an impressive 45 minutes, as measured by PMB.

Crosbie adds that while it may have taken years for NOW to break through the bias against free papers, it’s now ‘way past’ any worries in that area, thanks to years of PMB readership measurement.

According to Mike Trudeau, manager of marketing research and information for Toronto-based Torstar (which owns Eye), being able to supply buyers with industry standard readership numbers is particularly crucial for freebies, given the distrust over how many circulated copies are actually read.

‘The real important factor is the audience,’ he says. ‘Circulation numbers by themselves don’t mean a whole heck of a lot. It’s like the difference between counting households with television and the people watching the programs.’

HYPN’s Young agrees, going so far as to say that the whole free versus paid factor is a red herring that shouldn’t be considered by buyers when choosing papers these days. It doesn’t affect how loyal a reader is, it doesn’t affect time spent reading, he says, and it’s not even a good indicator of the quality of the product.

‘You have good paid publications, and bad paid. You have good free and bad free. And bad free is going to have weak readership and an uncommitted reader, and good free is going to produce a strong readership and a committed reader. It’s just a function of the editorial product.’