The news that the MailOnline has finally turned a profit was met with the usual divided opinion that greets anything related to the Daily Mail.
Many have lambasted the popularity of its ‘Sidebar of shame’ that has become its USP. But love it or hate it, you cannot argue with the figures – and I’m not talking Kim Kardashian or TOWIE’s Sam Faiers!
The website became profitable only in June of this year after achieving almost 80% year-on-year rise in revenues, mostly due to advertising, and means that MailOnline is set to generate almost £30m this year, according to Media Week.
MailOnline attracted more than 5.6m daily unique browsers in May, according to the last audited ABCe figures, and almost 92m monthly uniques.
Mobile users account for about a quarter of daily users, with the site's iPhone and Android apps attracting more than 220,000 people a day.
So what is the secret of its success? Why has the Daily Mail been able to crack the digital nut that Murdoch has so far failed to dent?
For me the answer lies with the two aforementioned ladies, Kim Kardashian and Sam Faiers. Well, them and a ton of other reality show ‘stars’ that make up the much maligned but massively popular ‘sidebar of shame’.
The Mail executives, headed up by publisher Martin Clarke, were extremely clever and courageous in their approach to MailOnline. They decided to produce a website that was Daily Mail in branding but little else.
They had the audacity and the foresight to go to market with an online product that was extremely different than the traditional print version.
I conducted a straw poll of Daily Mail readers (ok, it was just my mother-in-law as I don’t know any others) and she has no idea who Kim Kardashian or Sam Faiers are. (I was about to explain why they were famous, but thought better of it in Kim’s case, not the type of conversation one wants with the mother-in-law!)
The point of my extensive research is to highlight just how different the two Mail products are. Even an occasional browser will know luminaries such as Kim, Sam and the rest of her band of realty TV ‘stars’, yet traditional print readers remain happily oblivious to their very existence.
Of course they are politically the same and the MailOnline has all the news that is carried in the newspaper but it is the celebrity gossip – and the fondness for bikini-clad images – that has somehow shot it to such dizzy heights.
Very simply, their formula works and, as I said before, love it or loath it, you have to respect the bravery of producing a product so very different to its original. They gambled on a younger online audience buying into what the MailOnline offered and won, big time.
That takes guts and it takes vision - so hats off to the big guns at the Mail; there certainly is no shame in finally cracking that great big digital nut…
Source:
http://tangerine-digital-pr.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-daily-mail-kim-kardashian-x-towie.html