In March 2009 we had around 2 million page impressions a month, and 4 months later we were over 4 million. Not huge, but considerably more than most sites on the web, and not bad for a local newspaper. Clearly with our new site having decent SEO and hundreds of thousands of pages (mainly due to our going out guide that generated pages from the stacks of events data that we got from PA, local information from LDC and bar/restaurant reviews from Hardens) for Google to spider, we would have expected to continue to grow at a pretty healthy rate for at least the rest of the year, given the chance.

And by the way, the amount spent on the website was a minority of the overall running costs of the business (£9m was apparently lost in the third year of business, although possibly this may have been the overall loss of the three years with a £16+m loss in the first and then gradual gains in the second, taking the balance to £12m debt, and then the third getting up to £9m debt) – and we even came in about a third under budget (which was a lot loss than £9m!) on the website overhaul, as some of the planned features were scaled back to meet the rushed launch date imposed by the paper editor (work only started about 5 weeks prior due to problems with legal contracts with some of our service suppliers and the NI legal team not really having dealt with anything like this before).

Another point to note was that our newspaper sub-editing process was becoming integrated with that for the website, instead of being two virtually separate systems as they were before the new site, so overall the new site was helping the company save more money.

Metro isn’t a London freesheet, by the way, it’s national, and was launched by thelondonpaper’s editor (who went on to launch thelondonpaper)… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Associated_Metro_Limited)

Personally I think if there had never been a London Lite, thelondonpaper would have made it a lot closer to getting into the black, as wouldn’t have had to spend a fortune on distributors and exclusivity contracts (at train stations and private estates like Canary Wharf) to get a decent distribution and readership. Metro had distributors when it first got going years ago, but was able to retire them relatively quickly as the paper became a part of people’s regular schedule and they knew they could find them in the bins at stations etc. thelondonpaper wasn’t in a position to do a similar thing in the afternoons because if they’d laid off the distributors, leaving the Lite with theirs still present, the floating readers would have taken the Lite pushed into their hands instead of hunting down thelondonpaper from a bin.

So it was always going to be a major struggle, and after 3 years and a new overall strategy regarding the value of content, NI decided it wasn’t worth continuing (despite The Times making far bigger losses than thelondonpaper! http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23685727-losses-jump-17-at-murdochs-times-as-advertising-slides.do ). Apparently Murdoch had always wanted to charge 10p for thelondonpaper (but was talked around to it being free in order to maximise readership), and the new NI MD (promoted from editing The Sun) wasn’t a fan either, so not surprising they shut it down as soon as the recession took its toll on the advertising.