Charging can be expensive. It takes quite a bit of effort to charge, to take money, to manage the money, to set up the accounting and bureaucracy for managing each transaction. And, even worse, if you’re working with third party distributors, like news agents, then you have to handle financial relationships with them as well. Getting rid of the per paper price changes the economics not just on the revenue side, but on the cost side as well — something that’s rarely discussed at all.

The always insightful TechDirt has a great little post on the apparent success of the London Evening Standard becoming a free newspaper.

I’d never given a lot of thought to costs associated with charging for the paper. Beyond the costs mentioned above, I would guess that eliminating paid subscriptions also means you can cut way down on customer service issues.