Regional Press

John Reynolds, mediaweek.co.uk, 09 February 2010, 12:40pm

Metro pursues online revenue grab

LONDON - The Metro, Associated's free city-based newspaper, is undertaking a major commercial drive on its website, metro.co.uk, as it looks to ramp up its online earnings.

The drive comes as the The Metro's new-look website, boasting new audio and video tools, switches to live from test phase within the next month.

As part of the overhaul, the editorial and product team will have a more commercial focus and report into Jamie Walters, digital director.

The team previously reported to Kenny Campbell, the editor of The Metro.

Key to the changes is that The Metro - over the next 12 months- will look to launch new revenue earning components to Metro.Co.uk. Currently, the website has a revenue-earning gambling channel.

But it will now look to launch similar offerings with a focus on entertainment, though when pressed would not give further details.

Jamie Walters, digital director of Metro.co.uk, pinpointed the problems hitting newspaper websites. He said: "Websites are struggling to make money. There is too much inventory on the market and too much fragmentation."

Walters argues that the move to a closer relationship between commercial and editorial was doing away with the old "church" and "state" mentality existing in newspaper editorial and commercial units.

The Metro has undertaken major research and dubbed its online audience "City Clickers", as it looks to showcase advertisers the value of its audience.

City Clickers are a group of 15m people, between 18 and 44 years-old, who make heavy use of the internet to facilitate their busy offline lives.

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All Comments

Dave Gurney, Operations Director, Alchemetrics - 10 February 2010

While not privy to the changes currently being implemented to the back end of the site, Metro would be wise to turn data collected from its active audience of 'city clickers' into a revenue stream. If I'm not mistaken, the Metro website has a good couple of million unique users, maybe more, so with the addition of a simple data collection plug-in there is huge scope to gather valuable data. Software like this needn't be intrusive or even served as a pop-up – it works just as well embedded into the site, and in the Metro's case positioned as a 'themed' reader survey. Return visits can offer a different combination of questions, plugging the gap in the knowledge collated and leaving Metro Associated with a growing library of reader data to offer to interested parties.