Daily Mail Leapfrogs Huffington Post in Web Traffic
Watch out, internet, the British are coming. MailOnline, the network of sites for Associated Newspapers including the Daily Mail, is now the world's second largest "newspaper" site thanks to a 27% increase in traffic from February to March. With 39,635,000 unique visitors according to comScore, the Daily Mail has eclipsed the recently acquired Huffington Post who saw a 20% jump to 38,429,000 visitors.
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While the comScore tally includes a web-only site like the Huffington Post, it does not include others like Yahoo! News. And it also doesn't include the sites of TV networks like CNN.com. Still, the rise of a UK paper is attracting notice since, even though the Daily Mail trails the Grey Lady by quite a bit, these numbers are largely before the The New York Times introduced a 20-article limit went live on March 28. In that month Times traffic surged 41% to a new record of 61,964,000 visitors, according to comScore. But since traffic has been estimated to be down by 15%. The Huffington Post, meanwhile, may manage a comeback as the site absorbs a number of AOL properties in the wake of the site's acquisition and Arianna Huffington's new role as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group. The Huffington Post is also planning to launch a UK version this summer.
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That's not all. The Guardian announced last month it will make a second attempt at setting up shop in the United States and exported Guardian.co.uk editor Janine Gibson to New York. The first try turned out to be poorly timed as Guardian America launched just before the American economy tanked, taking a lot of media jobs down with it. Currently ranked number five in web traffic, the Guardian says they're going all in on the web and described the new American effort as a "startup in the world capital of digital media." On that note, now that robots can write better news articles than humans, everybody's screwed.
