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What is the point of MailOnline? The answer is simple enough for its 17m daily visitors: free celebrity sizzle and moreish tabloid news on an endless scroll. For its owner Lord Rothermere the question is more complicated.
Rothermere initially created MailOnline as a digital insurance policy for the Daily Mail, setting it up as a separate operation to avoid distracting the newspaper that has bankrolled his family’s media dynasty.
But 15 years on, MailOnline has grown into something more, a business big enough to determine the fate of the publication it was meant to serve. MailOnline has thrived by sharing the Daily Mail brand and some of its content, yet these businesses’ interests are now unmistakably at odds.
The website and the paper have different audiences, mismatched editorial brands, and incomparable business models. One is a free news and entertainment website, while the other’s print afterlife depends on a paywall. Like two strong swimmers, they would do better in treacherous waters if their ankles were no longer tied.
Rothermere’s listed holding company, the Daily Mail and General Trust, continues to run the two titles as a messy tandem, rather than separating them entirely or putting one editor in command. In financial terms, it has left a definite winner.
Analysts now estimate MailOnline is worth more than DMGT’s entire stable of print titles, which includes the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the i and Metro. DMGT’s broker JPMorgan Chase valued MailOnline in May at almost £550m versus about £220m for the newspapers. BuzzFeed’s bankers might be even more optimistic.
On one level this is DMGT’s digital insurance paying out. While the style of its journalism stirs controversy, as a traffic magnet MailOnline has been a resounding success. It stole a march on tabloids and the entire US celebrity magazine industry to become one of the world’s most-read news websites.
MailOnline’s audience is younger and richer than the Daily Mail, and spread across the English-speaking world. The more traditional Daily Mail acts as the voice of Middle England.
The operations are increasingly distinct too. MailOnline still pays £10m or so to license Daily Mail content every year. But stories by MailOnline staff account for 90 per cent of traffic, according to its publisher Martin Clarke.
MailOnline is a sticky website — and has to be. Online advertising is a brutal market. Users spent 145m minutes a day in aggregate with MailOnline last year, an impressive feat that generated £144m in revenue and an undisclosed operating profit.
But let the reality of those numbers sink in: a reader needs to spend six hours on MailOnline for DMGT to generate £1 of revenue. Ad-funded general news truly is a hardscrabble business.
Compare that with the Daily Mail, which last year overtook The Sun to become Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper. Its daily circulation has been in decline for a decade and stands at just under 1m.
Yet for every copy sold last year, DMGT generated about £1 of revenue, with about 30p of that from advertising. The Mail newspaper titles still outstrip MailOnline’s operating profits, although the gap is narrowing.
To try to keep hold of those paying readers, the Daily Mail’s editor Geordie Greig has begun to carve out a separate digital strategy around the Mail+ website, which looks suspiciously like a rival to MailOnline (with fewer scantily dressed celebs).
It now charges for full access to original stories, podcasts and videos — and, curiously, even articles available for free on MailOnline. Little wonder by late 2020, a year after launch, it was attracting just 120,000 visitors a week. Subscription numbers for Mail+ are not disclosed.
Given the branding muddle, this underwhelming start is hardly surprising. How can DMGT expect readers to understand that DailyMail.co.uk is not run by the Daily Mail newspaper, or that a Mail+ online subscription has nothing to do with MailOnline?
To be given half a chance to succeed as a reader-funded enterprise, the Daily Mail needs its content back, as well as its brand. MailOnline, meanwhile, needs investment to do a better job of monetising its traffic.
The overhaul could be done through a hard separation within DMGT, or by spinning off MailOnline. Whatever the model, it is time to make good on a claim Clarke made in 2014: “Without a print product . . . you can just be who you want to be.â€
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