MailOnline
MailOnline (also known as dailymail.co.uk and dailymail.com outside the UK) is the website of the Daily Mail, a tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom, and of its sister paper The Mail on Sunday. MailOnline is a division of dmg media, which is owned by Daily Mail and General Trust plc.
Not to be confused with Email.
Type of site
Yes
Optional
2003
Active
Launched in 2003 by the Associated Newspapers’ digital division led by ANM managing director Andy Hart,[1] MailOnline was made into a separately managed site in 2006 under the editorship of Martin Clarke and general management of James Bromley.[2][3] It is now the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world,[4] with over 11.34m visitors daily in August 2014.[5]
Previously, there was an attempt to call into question the integrity of the website's journalism after NewsGuard's feature which is designed to fight what it describes as fake news, Microsoft Edge warned users against trusting content at the site, asserting that "this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability" and "has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases".[6] This warning has since been removed, and NewsGuard stated that the website "generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability", though it "still failed to gather and present information responsibly".[7]
Reach[edit]
The website has an international readership, featuring separate home pages for the UK, US, India and Australia.[8] While the MailOnline maintains the politically conservative editorial stance of the print edition, much of the content featured on the website is produced exclusively for the MailOnline and is not published in the Daily Mail. It is known for its "sidebar of shame",[9][10] a box listing celebrity misdemeanours.[4] The Financial Times, alluding to a quote by Samuel Johnson, has suggested that "If you are tired of MailOnline, you are tired of Kim Kardashian's life – and most readers are not."[4]
The website reached 199.4 million unique monthly visitors in December 2014,[11] up from 189.52 million in January 2014 and 128.59 million in May 2013,[12] according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.[13]
Globally, MailOnline is the most visited English-language newspaper website;[4] ComScore gave the site 61.6 million unique desktop computer visitors for January 2014, ahead of The New York Times' website, which received 41.97 million visitors in the same month.[14] According to ComScore, MailOnline recorded 100.5 million visitors across desktop computers, smartphones and tablets in that month.[15] In July 2014 it recorded 134 million users.[16]
Almost 70% of its traffic comes from outside the UK, mostly from the United States.[17] The Daily Mail print newspaper has no presence there, but has aggressively targeted the country with its online offering, branded as the "Daily Mail" rather than MailOnline.[4] In January 2014 it paid over £1m to the Charleston Daily Mail for the domain name www.dailymail.com in order to increase its attractiveness to US advertisers.[17]
In January 2014, it was ranked the eighth most-visited news website in Australia, up from tenth in December 2013.[18] Globally the site was forecast to reach £60m in advertising sales in the year to September 2014, up 49%.[19]
£35m has been invested in creating the site.[4] The site has introduced sponsored articles, with a guarantee of 450,000 page views at a cost of £65,000 per article.[4]
Content[edit]
MailOnline features a broad mixture of international news, and carries mainly UK-focused coverage of sport, personal finance, travel, celebrity news, science and lifestyle editorial. As of September 2014, it employs 615 people, including 406 editorial staff.[4] These create over 750 articles per day.[4]
A major component of the website is its entertainment news. It is estimated that 25% of the traffic received by the website is purely to access the entertainment and gossip stories.[20] The site publishes statistics about this activity.[21] The house rules state that the monitors usually remove comments they do not agree with or inappropriate content in full,[22] although they do reserve the right to edit comments.[23] The site also does not allow comments on some articles for legal or editorial reasons.[24]
Sourcing[edit]
In 2011, the first year of the Online Media awards, MailOnline won for "Best Brand Development."[25]
In March 2012, the Poynter Institute published an article criticising the MailOnline for failing to give proper attribution to the sources of some article content, and often reprinting paragraphs without permission or attribution. The article said that when the MailOnline is called out for stealing content, it will sometime removes the text in question without acknowledging or apologising for the problem.[26]
Martin Clarke, editor of MailOnline, said: "We will soon be introducing features that will allow us to link easily and prominently to other sites when further recognition of source material is needed."[26]
Daily Mail Australia has often been criticised by rival Australian news outlets, including Fairfax Media, News Corp Australia, ABC News, Nine Network, The New Zealand Herald and The Guardian Australia,[27] for rewriting the work of their journalists despite employing 90 editorial staff as of November 2018.[28] The Daily Mail has stated that other news outlets are threatened by their growing popularity and that they attribute their sources.[29]