I saw on Springwise that a Japanese company is offering university students free photocopies. They intend to recover their costs by printing ads on the back of the copy paper, which is slightly thicker than normal to prevent ads from shining through. For roughly £1,680 advertisers can have their message printed on 10,000 sheets of paper.

Tadacopy has placed machines on a few dozen campuses, and they are a big hit with students (no surprise if Japanese students are as skint as ours). The company was founded by students and installed it’s first free copy machine in April of last year.

It’s not exactly a new business model after all a good number of Internet businesses (Google etc) give their main product away and make their revenue via advertising. What I like about this idea however is the fact that people are more likely to keep the advert (as presumably they photocopied something useful onto it) and to pass it around to other people meaning your 10,000 copies might get seen by two to three times as many people and multiple times by each of those people making it more effective.

However I can’t help thinking it would be better to offer the service to serviced offices, libraries, chambers of commerce etc where the readers are more likely to have disposable income (or a budget) to spend.

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