Mail Online overtakes New York Times’ daily traffic

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 22 March, 2012 at 10:04 am, filed under Media Owners, Paywall, Web and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

The Mail Online appears to have secured its place as the world’s biggest online newspaper as it overtakes the New York Times’ in terms of daily visitor traffic for the first time, according to figures from Comscore.

In February it racked up an average of 6,265,000 unique visitors a day, compared with 6,239,000 for the The New York Times.

In January we reported that the Mail Online overtook the NYT’s monthly traffic in December to become the world’s biggest newspaper website. It reached 45.3 million people in December compared to 44.8 million for the New York Times. It remained ahead on that metric in February with 47,448,000 unique visitors.

At the time the the New York Times dismissed the British tabloid out of hand and said that it was simply not in its class.

It also pointed out that the Mail Online traffic figures included visitors not only to its newspaper website, but also from its personal finance site, thisismoney.co.uk and so was not a true reflection.

Earlier this week the New York Times unveiled plans to tighten its paywall and cut the number of free articles it gives away.

While that could help widen the gap between the two papers it does not appear to have dented the New York Times’ ability to sign up paying subscribers as the paper also gave an update on where its digital subscription numbers were at. It said that one year after launching its paid digital subscriptions it has around 454,000 paid subscribers.

The lastest landmark for the Mail came as it swept the board at the annual Press Awards both Newspaper of the Year and Website of the Year.

On winning Newspaper of the Year, editor Paul Dacre said: “I’d just like to pay the most enormous tribute to all the journalists on the Daily Mail and MailOnline, our new very successful, equal partner.

“I pay tribute to their extraordinary, selfless commitment, I pay tribute to their huge professionalism and talent. I’m very proud of them.

‘I’m also very, very proud of the British newspaper industry. And I’d like to say that for the most part I still believe it is the greatest newspaper industry in the world.”

The award for MailOnline said it was “difficult to argue with the readers’ verdict”, which has brought it success both here and in the U.S.

It also said that the “large amount of original content makes it essential reading in the newsrooms of competitors”.

MailOnline Publisher Martin Clarke said: “I like to think what we do on MailOnline encapsulates the best of Fleet Street.”