Free press takes on Warsaw media market
By : Anna Kocinska
Competition is heating up in Warsaw's press market as foreign-backed free newspapers are taking on Agora's flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza for valuable media ad sales.
Dzien Dobry, published by Marieberg Publications, a subsidiary of the Swedish media group Bonnier, said last week it had notched up a 6% share of the capital's ad market after just five months in Warsaw. The company reported sales of zl. 790,000 for January.
"Our goal is to achieve a 10% share in Warsaw's ad market by the end of this year," said Morten Lindholm, vice president of Marieberg Publications. Dzien Dobry is published weekly and has a circulation of 300,000 copies. Lindholm said Marieberg has invested $2.5 million in the newspaper. "We will be reaching the break-even point this year," he added.
Another Swedish media company, Metro International (MI), also distributes 200,000 copies of its free daily, Metropol, in Warsaw after launching in November. MI's publishing empire of free newspapers now stretches to 13 countries. Meanwhile, 4Media, the former tannery, has plans to launch the free daily Gazeta Bezplatna Metro in the spring.
But despite the new publications hitting the streets, Gazeta Wyborcza still dominates the market. According to estimates by Agora monitoring, the company's market research arm, last year Gazeta Wyborcza accounted for 80% of press ad sales in the capital.
"I can't say if anything will change on the Warsaw market, we have to wait for the (April) results of the readership survey conducted by SMG/KRC (a Warsaw-based research company)," said Dorota Nowak, Agora's spokeswoman. "That survey also includes free press. But we see Metropol as our potential competitor."
As a result of this competition, Agora recently started distributing Metro, a sub-local supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza, in southern Warsaw.
Ironically, last week's estimates of Dzien Dobry's position in the ad market came from Agora monitoring, according to Krzysztof Lach, the daily's market analyst. "We sold the results (Dzien Dobry's monthly sales in January) to them," said Agora's Nowak. "But those were only nominal figures based on a price list, so you don't know how much ad space they really sold."
Reliable readership ratings and ad sale estimates are essential for the free press if it's to gain any substantial ground in Warsaw. Market players, particularly advertisers, want to see results before committing cash. To date, SMG/KRC's surveys don't cover the local and free press.
"It's obvious that Gazeta Wyborcza will lose out with the launch of free publications," said Maciej Chodorowski, director for research at CR-Media, an advertising and media consultancy. "On the other hand, advertisers won't open their wallets to publishers of the free press before they can get reliable data on readership and sales."
According to surveys conducted by market research company Demoskop, Dzien Dobry's readership in Warsaw last month exceeded that of Gazeta Stoleczna, Gazeta Wyborcza's Warsaw supplement, and reached almost 30% of the population. But according to Chodorowski, advertisers can only rely on research done by SMG/KRC and commissioned by the Polskie Badania Czytelnictwa (PBC), an association of Polish publishers. "I don't think that surveys conducted by Demoskop and commissioned by the company, which is interested in its results, might mean anything to advertisers," Chodorowski said. "Advertisers want one stable method of research."
Moreover, since SMG/KRC's research doesn't include local and free press, some free press publishers are setting up their own research firms.
4Media, which wants to publish free dailies in each of the nation's 16 provinces, already has plans to set up a market research company to handle local press.
"It will be a way of convincing advertisers that the potential of the local press market is huge," said Monika Sarnecka, spokeswoman for 4Media.
Meanwhile, according to Dzien Dobry's Lach, his company is still relying on PBC. "We signed a letter of intent with PBC, although their current research doesn't cover local publications like ours," he said. "But we're working on extending the research into a kind of a thematic survey that would exclusively cover local weeklies."
