Metro International 1995: give the paper away in the subway, sell only the ads

In 1973, 19-year-old Stockholm journalism student Pelle Anderson heard a lecture on newspaper economics: subscription revenue for a typical Swedish daily roughly matched distribution costs, with profit coming from advertising. If that were true, he reasoned, a paper could be given away free as long as it guaranteed its audience — the profit would come purely from ads. The idea sat for two decades until, in 1992, Anderson, Robert Braunerhielm and Monica Lindstedt pitched it to Stockholm's transport authority, and Modern Times Group put up Skr50 million (about $7.3m) to build it.

On 13 February 1995 the first Metro was printed in 125,000 copies and handed out across Stockholm's subway; they were gone within 15 minutes, snapped up by the young urban readers advertisers most wanted. The model inverted the industry's economics: no cover price, revenue only from advertising, a standardized editorial template repeated in every city, and a distribution system designed around commuter flows rather than newsstands. With about 30 journalists against Dagens Nyheter's 300, Metro Stockholm was profitable within a year.

The template travelled. By 2005 Metro International published 59 editions in 83 cities and claimed 15m+ readers — the most-read newspaper outside Japan — with revenue up from $9.6m in 1995 to $302m in 2004. By 2007 it ran 70 editions in 19 countries at about 9m copies a day, and free dailies worldwide totaled roughly 34m daily copies, forcing paid-for newspapers across Europe to answer the freesheet challenge.