Schibsted folds free daily newspaper, buys minority stake in Metro Sweden
Swedish daily tabloid Aftonbladet, owned by Norwegian media company Schibsted, has shut down its daily free commuter newspaper, Punkt SE (literally “Dot SE”. Had I been a Swedish headline writer I would have gone with punkt slut, which is quite a bit funnier in English than in Swedish). Schibsted decided that wasting time and money on competing with the entrenched competition is kind of stupid when you instead can buy a 35% stake in said competition for $58 million (actually 350 million Swedish kronor, SEK), said competition being Metro Sweden. Schibsted and Metro Sweden will also form a joint venture in advertising.
Punkt SE was launched in october 2006. The accumulated loss for the newspaper in 2006 and 2007 was 258 million kronor ($42 million), which, when you think about it, really isn’t more than a typical U.S. dotcom might have gone through in 1999-2000. On the other hand, each dotcom was striving for world supremacy, while Punkt SE was merely trying to get a slice of the action at commuter railroad stations in places like Östertälje, Tumba, and Stuvsta.
The dotcom analogy is actually not that out of place. The exciting industry of free daily tabloid newspaper distribution along commuter lines was booming back in 2006, with advertising growth that far outpaced that of turgid paid-for and distributed everywhere newspapers. But that was then. Today, free newspapers are almost as unexciting as fee newspapers and it’s time to consolidate the industry and clear out the clutter. Schibsted gets rid of a money loser and Metro Sweden, publisher of the original Metro newspaper, gets a nice little cash infusion along with decreased competition.
Judging from comments on online message boards, Punkt SE’s editorial quality was on par with that of BostonNow, a godawful free newspaper that an Icelandic company unleashed on the cradle of democracy last year but then threw in the towel on earlier this year.
