Media Forum: Are free titles the way forward?

Will more free magazines follow Sport into the men's market, Alasdair Reid asks.

At first glance, Monkey and Sport don't seem to have much in common Except, obviously, for the fact that they're both targeted at a young male audience. And that both are distributed for free. Actually, come to think of it, we might be on to something here - because both have just reported highly encouraging audience figures.

Monkey, the web-only property launched by Dennis Publishing last November, has released a debut eABC figure of 209,612, making it, the publisher claims, the 'fastest-growing men's magazine in the world'.

This somewhat stretches the definition of magazine - a link to a Monkey website is e-mailed to a distribution list every Wednesday - but we know what they mean.

No such problems of definition exist for Sport, which has inky pages printed on review-quality news print. Launched last September, it is distributed at commuter locations (two-thirds of the total) between 7.00 and 9.30 on a Friday morning, and is also available at places such as gyms.

Its target market is men aged 18 to 40, and its average issue circulation during February was 321,893, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations report. Last week, it also released details of a specially commissioned survey from YouGov, showing that 82 per cent of its readership lies with the ABC1 demographic. That, the publisher claims, is the highest ABC1 ratio of any men's magazine in the UK.

Both projects, in other words, are doing rather nicely. So, will we see more free products in this sector? After all, the men's market is hardly saturated. Though there are plenty of titles, both weekly and monthly, vast tracts of the male audience remain virgin territory where magazine (or magazine-owned website) consumption is concerned.