MailOnline and the next page for the 'sidebar of shame'

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 24 Σεπτεμβρίου 2014 - 14:32

Martin Clarke does not want his photograph taken. The man who publishes dozens of revealing celebrity pictures a day on MailOnline says he is too tired, having been up since 3am editing the website's coverage of the Scottish referendum. "Not today, mate," he says. Perhaps seeing the irony, he relents. "Quick, do it then."

Mr Clarke, an old-school newspaper man, has created one of the world's digital news success stories. He took the Daily Mail - a title so traditional that its editor is said to have his emails printed out before reading them - and spun off a news and entertainment site that now attracts 11m users a day.

MailOnline's revenues are on track to grow by nearly half to £60m this financial year. It is expanding its US operations under the leadership of the man who is sitting beside the ballot-fatigued Mr Clarke today: BuzzFeed's former second-in-command Jon Steinberg.

Mr Clarke suggests the website can aspire to be "as profitable as the newspaper", which brings in between £70m and £80m in operating profit a year.

"There are going to end up being four or five big global news brands," the MailOnline publisher says, naming Yahoo, CNN, the BBC and The New York Times. "We need to be one of them, we're going to be one of them."

MailOnline, part of the London-listed company Daily Mail and General Trust, is currently the world's most popular English-language newspaper website (three Chinese publications rank higher). When other news sources such as Yahoo are included, it ranks number two in the UK, number seven in the US, and number 10 in Australia.

Its long headlines hook readers on stories; the page layout keeps them reading; and the "sidebar of shame" - as a box of celebrity misdemeanours is known - means the next guilty pleasure is never far away. If you are tired of MailOnline, you are tired of Kim Kardashian's life - and most readers are not.

But there are sceptics: MailOnline's biggest source of revenue is selling banner advertisements, which Mr Steinberg himself once described as "a terrible advertising product".

It faces well-funded competitors such as BuzzFeed and Vice News, which are more adept at lucrative sponsored content, known as "native advertising". And then there is the cost base: to produce its daily mix of more than 750 articles, MailOnline employs 615 people, including 406 journalists. That is the case even though many stories are taken from news wire services, or repackaged from other newspapers.

"It remains unprofitable today and it seems that every increase in revenue is accompanied by a further increase in cost," Mike Darcey, chief executive of its rival News UK, owner of The Sun and The Times, said this year. "Does this ever resolve itself, do revenues ever outstrip costs? Personally I have my doubts."

Mr Clarke, not known for having a thick skin, calls that assessment "utterly wrong". Unlike print products, MailOnline's distribution costs barely rise as its readership grows, he argues.

"Why don't you ring Mr Darcey and ask him how much longer The Sun paywall is going to be up? And when he brings it down, would you ask him to give me a call because there are a couple of bones I'd like to pick with him? I'm not like Darcey, I don't spend my time telling other people how to run their businesses."

A spokesman for Mr Darcey said giving away The Sun's content would make "no business sense".

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>MailOnline has cost its parent group about £35m to date. Without continuing investments in the US, Australia and soon elsewhere, it would be profitable, Mr Clarke says. "But we don't want to be a bit profitable in Britain, we want to be very profitable globally."

At present the hype surrounds news sites aimed at those born in the 1980s and 1990s, known as "millennials". BuzzFeed was valued at $850m by an investment from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; in contrast equity analysts value DMGT's media division, which includes the Daily Mail print titles and MailOnline, at about £1bn.

Can the UK site match BuzzFeed's new $50m war chest? "We're not investing anything like that," says Mr Clarke. "That would probably be more than we really need. We've got good plans for video, but I don't want to set up a film studio . . . You can only do what you're good at. We're good at news."

He wants MailOnline to focus on global stories such as "Isis, Gaza, Ebola, the Malaysian jets". Television does foreign news "in pretty much the same way", he adds. "Even relying on agency copy and stringers, we can own those stories." So MailOnline is investing in more journalists to deepen its coverage.

Mr Steinberg, meanwhile, is charged with increasing MailOnline's work with brands. MailOnline is hoping brands will pay £65,000 per sponsored article, with a guarantee of 450,000 page views. Some of these pieces will sit in new boxes on the left-hand side of the page.

The native advertising will be clearly labelled. However, unlike at BuzzFeed, the same journalists who write editorial content also write sponsored articles, creating potential conflicts of interest.

Since joining MailOnline three months ago, Mr Steinberg has become a partial convert to banner ads. "I'd say my view on high-impact homepage takeovers has certainly changed," he says, referring to advertisers' ability to place advertising on the site's background.

In the US MailOnline is branding itself "Daily Mail", and recently paid more than £1m to buy the web domain dailymail.com from a newspaper in Charleston, West Virginia. Mr Steinberg is keen to play on the newspaper's heritage. "It feels like Burberry," he says. "There's an aspect of the brand that is aspirational."

Not everyone would agree. The actor George Clooney called it the "the worst kind of tabloid" after an inaccurate story about his fiancee's family.

"We made a big error," says Mr Clarke. But he goes on: "Our best readers are celebrities. They love the pictures of themselves. I'm not hobnobbing with celebrities everyday, but when I do run into people like the Kardashians, they adore what we do."

MailOnline is keen not to become dependent on social media for its articles to reach readers. A tweak to Facebook's algorithms caused its traffic to surge in January and then fall back. "I don't want to be somebody who's just providing free content for Facebook," says Mr Clarke.

About 40 per cent of MailOnline's traffic comes from readers who access it via the homepage or its mobile apps. That is a reflection on Mr Clarke himself, who spends hours each day ranking stories, writing headlines and picking photos. Does he ever look at the site and think it is just perfect? "Never," he says.

One former employee has lambasted life at MailOnline as a "battery hen operation". But Mr Clarke seems to enjoy its demands. As Mr Steinberg says: "The minute you walk out of here, he's going to rip the homepage up."