Online Media Goes Big And Bold… But Not Brilliant

Michael Hedges February 6, 2012 Follow on Twitter

Being number one means never having to explain the small things. Reaching into page view, audience and circulation figures for that competitive edge is risky. Like everybody else in this 140 character new media world, media people want just the headline. Details are so messy.

When web counter comScore anointed Mail Online as the world’s most visited newspaper website (January 25), surpassing the New York Times (NYT), there was a bitTorrent of analysis both near and far. Mail Online - dailymail.co.uk - is the website of the UK’s Daily Mail, not even the biggest tabloid going. It had in December 2011 45.35 million unique visitors when numbers from companion website thisismoney.co.uk are added, about a million. The NYT website had but 44.8 million. The rest were left in the dust.

Every newspaper has a website, sometimes several. So do radio and television channels. So do news agencies, PR shops, restaurants and animal shelters. It’s existential: without something for Google’s robots to search – and add ads to - there is only void. The internet has simplified all things.

The NYT PR machine huffed and puffed. “The New York Times remains the number one individual newspaper site worldwide,” said a spokesperson confirming that the NYT’s web traffic is relatively unchanged over the first paywall year. “In any case, a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.”

The Mail Online website is free-for-all – no paywall – and a free for all. “The way the web works is that it only makes sense to be free if you’re big,” said editor Martin Clarke to the New York Observer (June 11, 2011). In the great tradition of British tabloids, Mail Online practices that certain “creative” journalism.

“We just do news that people want to read,” said Clarke to BuzzFeed (January 25). Mail Online is unabashedly a celebrity gossip site, looking “haphazard” compared to the NYT site, most other newspaper websites or, even, the Daily Mail print edition. It is a “guilty pleasure,” noted Globe and Mail (Canada) columnist Leah McLaren (February 3). “In the intellectually promiscuous digital landscape, distinctions between high and lowbrow media look blurrier by the day.”

Not blurred is the distinction between Mail Online – the website – and Daily Mail – the newspaper. Mail Online is not a newspaper that happens to be online. While the Daily Mail contains news tailored for its conservative British audience spiced with goofy stuff, Mail Online is, arguably, all goofy stuff with the appearance of just enough meat.

And, unlike the Daily Mail, it reaches quite seriously across borders. Not an insignificant portion of its comScore-tallied unique visitors are outside the UK.  And Mail Online doesn’t link, defying the all too conventional new media convention.

Not lost on media watchers are similarities between Mail Online and the Huffington Post, web natives both. “It’s click bait,” said Salon’s Will Oremus (February 3), “the stuff pageviews are made of. There’s no parochialism, no xenophobia, no mock outrage, and almost no politics—nothing that could limit the potential audience for these pieces, which is, in short, the entire English-speaking online world.”

The Huffington Post is spreading like wildfire or, to parse new media-speak, a virus. After besting pure aggregators like Drudge Report in the US comScores and breaking into the top tier of the “newspaper” category, “Huff Po” began reaching across borders, first into Canada with an English-language site, then into the UK last summer. And now, on to France.

Le Huffington Post France launched (January 23) as a joint venture with big league French publishers Le Monde Group and Les Nouvelles Editions Independantes. In a stroke of market genius, high-profile journalist and celebrity in her own right Anne Sinclair was named editorial director. With Spain’s biggest daily newspaper El Pais, the Spanish edition is to launch in March. The Italian Huffington Post will debut later in this year as a joint venture with Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of La Repubblica.

Big media houses, it seems, are ready to engage online media differently with wholly online offerings. Le Huff Po will have a fair share of viewer competition in France from news sites Rue89, recently purchased by Le Nouvel Observateur, Slate.fr, a joint venture with the Washington Post and Mediapart. The real competition is for advertising revenue, advantage always going to the biggest.

Not all has been perfect for the Huffington Post outreach. The UK edition, if it can be called that, has seen a tepid response. But there’s lots of competition, not only from Mail Online. The Guardian, the Independent and the Telegraph have robust online editions, all free-for-all, which increasingly reach beyond the UK borders. Nobody quite knows how things are going at News International’s Times online, behind-the-paywall edition.

Also not happy is the French-Canadian Huffington Post Quebec, scheduled to launch this week (February 8). Several recruited high-profile bloggers quit, so to speak, over pay, or lack thereof. Fortunately for Ariana Huffington there is an endless supply of writers who will work for the thrill of seeing their tomes, and names, on the web.

Massive traffic is necessary to bring the jingle of “digital pennies.” Piling them up requires a whole new (media) view. It’s a global view with room for very few at the top. The people at Google know this. And so do the people at Facebook.

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