Study On Market Positioning Of Metro Newspapers On Chinese Mainland Illustrated

With the informatization sweeping across the world in the last20thcentury, new mediasuch as web have almost penetrated every area，as a consequence of which the media industryhas also changed a lot. Traditional newspapers stepped onto the road of decline because of ahuge slide in adverting revenue, and the prediction that newspapers would die out keptemerging. Free newspapers came out as a new modality of newspaper in that marketbackground and brought traditional newspapers hope and chance. Metro newspapers started toenter the public’s vision as the most successful and representative free newspaper. With thepopularization of metro construction, they gradually rooted in every metro city across theworld.“Guangzhou Metro”came into being in2006, viewed as the first metro newspaper ofChinese mainland in the true sense. From then on metro newspapers of mainland have steponto the fast track.Relying on big newspaper groups, metro newspapers of Chinese mainland have aimed atthe subway family with solid economic strength and young. They edit newspapers that matchwith the subway family’s demand and distribute freely in subway stations. Metro newspapersin Shanghai and Guangzhou have made some progress, which have reaped much advertisingrevenues while getting huge circulations. As more and more metro construction projects start,metro newspapers have faced bigger chances. At present, metro newspapers on mainlandcommonly distribute both underground and aboveground and the audience positioning is alsochanged to be office workers.This article mainly expounds issues on metro newspapers’ market positioning. It iswritten within the theoretic framework of media market positioning in Media Economics, andsummarizes that “Guangzhou Metro” the example proposes metro economics in conceptpositioning and aims at the subway family, while sticking to subway family’s subculture andmaking good use of metro channel.The article summarizes several common characteristics of mainland metro newspapers inmarket positioning, namely relying on the metro channel and free model and conforming tosubway family’s subculture. However, most metro newspapers on mainland straightly copyoverseas model, and expand aboveground distribution market while in the early stage ofdevelopment, which would have negative impacts on their market positioning. Therefore, thisarticle abstracts “Market segmentation, differentiation, low cost” as keywords for metro newspapers’ market positioning, and put forward the ideas that metro newspapers shouldfederate and stick to the metro channel resource in the early stage and be more different togain competitive advantages.