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Three years ago, London saw the launch of two free papers. The London Lite and the London Paper. Advertisement driven it transformed the commute home after work by bringing free news to digest on the way home. But In the last few months, both papers have gone. Only to be replaced by the Evening Standard. So what happened?

Both papers at their biggest had huge readerships. The London Lite had a readership of 400,000 while the London Paper had around 500,348. It worked, or didn’t by selling advertising space in the papers.

The London Paper, which was announced first but came out just after the Lite was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp while the London Lite was set up by the owners of the Daily Mail and Standard as a rival.

Both lost huge amounts of money, being badly hit by the recession which basically killed advertising. If you look before the recession, the Metro earned £8m in it’s first year. The London Paper wasn’t so lucky recording a pre-tax loss of £12.9m in the year to 29 June 2008. In the previous 10 months it had lost £16.8m.

But both papers also faced opposition from both the underground and the central London councils. Westminster reported an extra 1000 tonnes of waste paper a year.

After the London Paper collapsed the way look set for the London Lite to completely take over but as they were owned by the Evening Standard it made more sense for them to make that free. So that’s what we have now. A free Standard and an interesting experiment in social news.