Mail online goes top of the world

The Daily Mail has become the leading online newspaper in the world, according to figures by the tracking service comScore. The British middle-market tabloid has eclipsed the previous, and long-time, holder of the top spot, the New York Times. The figures show that Mail online reached 45.3m people last December compared to the NY Times's 44.8m. Trailing behind them are USA Today, the US-based Tribune newspapers and The Guardian. Mail's online's editor, Martin Clarke, puts it down to ever-improving US traffic, and says: "We just do news that people want to read." In an interview with the BuzzFeed website, he talks about the paper's middle-class roots and its "Fleet Street heritage" being the source of its "entertaining, engaging way with clear, concise, straightforward copy and lots of good pictures." BuzzFeed's unidentified author describes the Mail's website as being unlike any other online properties: "It's dense and almost endlessly scrolling, and feels like several newspapers stacked on top of one another. It blends original reporting with sharp rewrite, celebrity gossip and hard news, citing but relatively rarely linking out to other publications." The NY Times isn't too happy about being overtaken. A spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, disputed the way the comScore figures are compiled. She says the Mail only passed the Times by including in its total a personal finance site published by the paper. "It's a roll-up of their properties," she says, arguing that the Times could beat the Mail if it included its Boston Globe properties in its total. We remain the number one individual newspaper site in the world, she says. She also distances the two papers by saying the Mail "is not in our competitive set." As the author rightly points out, online traffic is notorious for the varying slices that can be taken, and there's no clear standard. So "the finance site appears to be more integral to the Mail than the Globe is to the Times." Anyway, comScore numbers are regarded in the US as an industry standard widely used by publishers and advertisers. Clarke says: "We are now one of the biggest players in terms of internet news, as is the New York Times, and I'm sure we both will be for a while." But he adds: "Our trajectory, and our momentum, is a lot faster than the New York Times." The Mail has 20 staff working per day in New York and nine in Los Angeles.