To connect with young, urban readers, Metro Canada is offering on-the-go news to Canadian cellphone users through a new content portal.
The site provides real-time Metro news updates through a text-based mobile site at mobile.metronews.ca, an image enhanced site for 3G devices at iphone.metronews.ca, or the Viigo application for Blackberry at viigo.metronews.ca.
“There are so many different devices…as devices evolve it becomes important to reach everybody on any platform that they choose,” said Jodi Brown, interactive director for Metro Canada.
When users first visit the site, they are asked to select one of seven cities with a Metro presence—Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax—which they can bookmark for future use.
Metro Mobile is offering advertisers monthly sponsorship packages, which include a banner ad that will appear across all three mobile platforms and on every page, said Brown. Metro hadn’t sold any packages as of press time, though talks with major advertisers are ongoing, said Brown.
Metro is supporting the mobile launch with ads in all seven print editions, radio ads in select markets, and through Gateway Newstands in Toronto, for the next four weeks.
In an effort to boost online readership, the free daily recently revamped its MetroNews.ca and JournalMetro.com websites, which receive approximately 225,000 unique visitors and 1.5 million page views a month according to comScore.
