Has the Mail really ‘defied the online movement’?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 11 November 2006 at 13:39
Tags: Daily Mail
Roy Greenslade yesterday recounted Andrew Neil’s exchange at the Society of Editors conference with Donna Leigh, who asked him to account for the contradiction between the Mail titles’ success in print and their owners’ long-time indifference to the Internet.
Greenslade concludes: “The drama for the Mail - as, I suspect, Leigh was hinting at - is whether its online version will attract as large and as loyal an audience as the newsprint version.”
At the conference Neil blustered and later allegedly dismissed Leigh as “an anorak”. But the easy answer for both Neil could have been to question Leigh’s assumptions, which are a bit out of date.
While it is true that Associated was slow to bring its titles online in a serious way, it has rapidly caught up this year.
This Alexa graph, comparing the traffic of DailyMail.co.uk, Times Online, and Telegraph.co.uk, impressively illustrates the rapid rise of the Mail site in the past 12 to 18 months.
The graph shows that after years at the bottom of the pile, the Mail is suddenly getting the sort of traffic that the better-established newspaper web sites have long enjoyed. Plug in some other URLs, and Alexa that the Mail this year passed the Indy and the Sun Online.
Alexa statistics are, of course, notoriously dubious. They are based on a self-selecting sample of people who install a toolbar that monitors their internet use, which biases it towards a tech-savvy audience. But they are at least a decent approximation in general trends in websites’ relative traffic.
ABCe-audited figures are based on internal server logs and therefore are the best measure of web traffic. In the latest available figures, for March of this year, DailyMail.co.uk had 2.4m unique users and just under 17.5m page impressions. A year earlier, in March 2005, ABCe shows DailyMail.co.uk with 969,180 uniques.
Since then, Alexa shows increased growth for DailyMail.co.uk, and an AN Digital source has claimed 6.6m users in September, citing Hitwise data.
The extended caveat: In March, ABCe shows Telegraph.co.uk had 5.9m uniques and 48.7m impressions. Since then, Alexa shows Telegraph.co.uk figures slumping, but its ABCe-audited figures are actually up between March and August.
Newspaper circulation figures are out this week, showing the usual good news for forests and prompting the usual call for some sort of multimedia metric of newspaper brands’ reach.
An important step towards this ideal would be some agreement on online audience figures. It’s a shame that not all major news sites are making their ABCe figures public. That would help us gain a more accurate sense of relative online reach, and would probably allow the Mail to do some more credible boasting about its online growth.
Tags: Daily Mail
