“The advertising market is already showing pockets of growth and maintaining a paid-for Independent would limit the potential for an advertising rebound at the title.

“It is likely that free distribution of The Independent will also increase brand visibility online and grow digital revenues.

“The Independent has the least to lose from shifting to a free model. Its circulation has significantly underperformed other national qualities, it has lost a quarter of circulation since 2005 with bulks already accounting for over 20 percent of circulation.

But: “A cut in cover price would only bring limited upside. In 2009, the title experienced the highest percentage decline in full-rate circulation despite keeping its cover price flat. Other broadsheets increased prices by nine percent on average. (Going free) would inevitably hurt the other quality titles .. National qualities have been warned.”

Thanks partly to the ad downturn, the outlook for freesheets had looked poor when Lebedev took the Standard free. In the tabloid market, DMGT and News International folded their free London Lite and The London Paper in the capital.

But Lebedev, trumpeting the Standard’s quality credentials, went full-steam, more than doubling the print run to 600,000. Now the Standard is hiking ad rates after a welcome response from advertisers, the paper’s managing director told paidContent:UK last month.

But Andrew Mullins reckoned the Standard can accomplish this due to the “quirk of our geography” in a city of affluent readers that advertisers love. He wasn’t speaking specifically about the Indy at the time, but his words suggest the Standard’s new stablemate shouldn’t follow down the free road: “When you have a paid-for title and you are nationally distributed, paid content is critical.”

Why is Lebedev buying the title… ? Strong ideological motivation…

A statement from his new Independent Publishing Ltd reminds readers that Lebedev, together with former Soviet president Gorbachev, owns Novaya Gazeta, “one of Russia’s few pro-democracy newspapers”, with “a reputation for independence” and whose reporter Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in 2006.

“I invest in institutions which contribute to democracy and transparency and, at the heart of that, are newspapers which report independently and campaign for the truth to be revealed,” Lebedev writes. “I am a supporter of in-depth investigative reporting and campaigns which promote transparency and seek to fight international corruption.

To that end, Lebedev and Gorbachev are together creating a new Novaya Independent Media Foundation (NIMF), “a not for profit organisation which will finance global media projects” - for Gazeta, The Indy and The Standard in particular…

Lebedev: “We hope that other philanthropists will also be interested in maintaining quality journalism to protect freedom of speech and encourage investigative reporting to promote greater transparency in society.”