LONDON — British tabloids typically send out paparazzi to poke into the lives of the royals, soccer coaches and supermodels. Lately, however, two free newspapers fighting a circulation battle on the streets of London have turned the cameras on each other.
One of the papers, London Lite, sent a video recently to media buyers that showed distributors ostensibly dumping 2,900 copies of its rival, The London Paper, into garbage bins. The London Paper responded by saying that it had pictures of dumped copies of London Lite.
The accusations matter to advertisers because newspaper ad prices are largely based on circulation. The British Audit Bureau of Circulations, an industry group, said that it would investigate.
The London Paper has a circulation of about 502,000, according to the audit bureau, in contrast to 400,000 for London Lite. But analysts say it is hard to know how many of those copies are actually read, because The London Paper and London Lite are distributed by street hawkers who try to press as many copies as they can into the hands of evening commuters.
“It’s all very well giving people a paper, but you then have no idea what they do with it,” said Jane Wolfson, head of nonbroadcast media at the London office of Initiative, a media buying agency.
The distribution method has also irked municipal authorities, who want London Lite and The London Paper to contribute to their recycling costs.
London free sheets are not the only newspapers that have faced circulation problems. In the United States, for example, a number of traditional papers bought by subscribers or sold on newsstands have been punished by the American audit bureau over the last few years for inflating their reported sales figures, sometimes through dumping.
One way around the problem might be for advertisers to look more at a newspaper’s readership and to pay less attention to circulation, said Piet Bakker, a journalism professor at the University of Amsterdam who tracks the free newspaper market. Readership is measured through surveys asking consumers which newspapers they regularly read. So papers that are dumped, by consumers or distributors, would not show up.
Because London Lite and The London Paper started publishing only last September, readership data is not available yet. Given the uncertainties, Ms. Wolfson said, advertising in free papers might be more expensive than in traditional London tabloids like The Sun, at least under the ad industry’s standard price comparison gauge, the cost of reaching 1,000 readers.
Ms. Wolfson said that from an advertiser’s perspective, the free papers had made up for that possible shortcoming through the “creativity of their executions.” For instance, they sometimes wrap articles around unusually shaped ads, to try to draw readers into the advertising.
With more than 26 million free newspapers circulated daily across Europe, Mr. Bakker said, the publishers are increasingly battling not just established papers that are sold, but also each other, for readers and advertisers. In Denmark, a hypercompetitive market for freebies, one of five such papers shut down in April.
In London, the battle between The London Paper and London Lite features the added element of Fleet Street rivalry. London Lite is owned by Associated Newspapers, publisher of The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard, while The London Paper is published by the News Corporation, which also owns The Sun and The Times.
As the battle between the free newspapers has heated up, each has taken out ads in trade publications aimed at media buyers and ad executives.
London Lite said that it had hired a former Scotland Yard detective inspector, Philip Swinburne, to uncover dumping of The London Paper.
“Now, how much does The London Paper charge you for advertising?” the ad asked media buyers. “D. I. Phil might call that daylight robbery.”
The London Paper countered by accusing Associated Newspapers of mounting a “dirty tricks campaign to destroy competition in the London newspaper market,” adding that it had dismissed the “rogue distributors” who dumped the copies.
Newspaper journalists sometimes joke grimly about how quickly their work ends up wrapping fish and chips or lining the cat box. For advertisers, who pay good money to cozy up to readers, even those ignominious ends must seem better than the reported fate of some free papers in London.
