Everyone has that friend. The one who, every time something from the Daily Mail gets shared on social media, feels compelled to reply almost instantly with “UGH. DON’T LINK TO THE MAIL. YOU’RE PLAYING INTO THEIR HANDS. THEY WIN IF YOU CLICK ON THAT LINK.” They’re the same type who habitually refer to it as the Daily Heil, or the Waily Mail, or the Maily Fail. The self-appointed community support officers who like to slip on their hi-viz tabards and pad around the internet telling other users to put that down and stop climbing on that.
If you can stomach the sanctimony, it’s actually kind of fun to watch them work. Seeing them get all hot and bothered by other people’s browsing habits can even be quite sweet, but it’s all predicated on this widely-held assumption that the Daily Mail (or, more correctly, its digital counterpart mailonline) is doing a roaring trade in tittle-tattle on the world wide web. When they announced their quarterly turnover earlier this month though, something struck us about the numbers. Because, for all its online omniscience, they seemed kind of small to us. Not the traffic itself, nor the number of readers, but the actual amount of money they’ve been able to glean off the whole racket.
So we decided to take a closer look.
If you can stomach the sanctimony, it’s actually kind of fun to watch them work. Seeing them get all hot and bothered by other people’s browsing habits can even be quite sweet, but it’s all predicated on this widely-held assumption that the Daily Mail (or, more correctly, its digital counterpart mailonline) is doing a roaring trade in tittle-tattle on the world wide web. When they announced their quarterly turnover earlier this month though, something struck us about the numbers. Because, for all its online omniscience, they seemed kind of small to us. Not the traffic itself, nor the number of readers, but the actual amount of money they’ve been able to glean off the whole racket.
So we decided to take a closer look.
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