London Evening Standard to increase distribution

The London Evening Standard is set to boost its distribution by an extra 100,000 copies from October.

Alexander Lebedev plans to increase the title’s distribution across existing points in London, a year after he dropped the Evening Standard‘s 50p cover price.

Reports suggest the move comes amid positive signs in the advertising market.  Last week, newspaper’s predicted that the Evening Standard is even close to making profit.

At the moment, it costs around £1.1 million to produce the Standard a week, and it is thought that the title brings in roughly the same amount in advertising revenues now.

Lebedev bought the loss-making paper for £1 from Daily Mail & General Trust in January 2009, when it had a circulation of around 237,000 and losses as high as £20 million.

Less than a year later, Lebedev announced plans to distribute more than 600,000 copies of the then re-launched Standard across London for free – a move that saved the paper around 50% in distribution costs.

The Standard has managed to increase its readership to more than 1.3 million now, according to NRS figures for October 2009 to March 2010.