Being successful with an evening free paper in Ukraine

Marina Dedenko from the Ukrainian publishing company Segodnya, spoke about the launch of the first free evening newspaper in the country.

After the launch of two successful newspapers in Kiev and Donetsk, Ukrainian publisher Segodnya found another niche in the market, and managed to grow the readership more than ever before.

Following the key values: truth (ethics), development, leadership (professionalism), client, team, independence and pluralism, the company decided to launch the first evening free paper “Vecherkom”.

By looking at the following strategy chart of “Vecherkom”, it is clear that it is targetted to the young reader for fast news consumption. In comparison with other newspapers, “Vecherkom” is less focused on politics, has reduced number of pages and less regional offices. It is also created by a relatively low number of journalists. Its strong points are: design, full color, and elasticity of layout for the advertisers:

The question of how to reach the young audience was solved by hiring young journalists, so they could create a newspaper for their friends and treat it as their forum of communication with young readers. The first marketing research proved “Vecherkom’s” success - almost half of the responding readers were younger than 30 (82% were younger than 40 years old).

Having young audience brings benefits in advertising - main clients of “Vecherkom” are banks, mobile operators, cars and computer manufacturers.

In 2 years time, the company as a whole managed to:

• grow its newspaper sales income by 59%
• grow it advertising income by 106%
• grow its printing service income by 1155%

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