
Mail Online hit a new website traffic record in January with 15.6m daily browsers and 243m over the course of the month, according to ABC.
This compares to the site’s previous record of 15.2m daily browsers in August 2016.
The site averaged just over 200m daily page impressions a day in a month where the news was dominated by the inauguration of US president Donald Trump.
In terms of unique browsers, around three quarters come from outside the UK, with 66m inside the UK. Each browser counted by ABC is a different device (rather a different person).
The Guardian website is believed to be in second place (in terms of UK newspaper websites), although it is not currently audited by ABC.
Its internal data claims 8.9m average daily browsers (up 18.7 per cent).
The Sun was the fastest growing website, up 122 per cent year on year to 4.2m unique browers per day.
All other UK national newspaper websites grew year on year, with the exception of the Telegraph which fell 12.3 per cent as it felt the effect of creating an online paywall for premium editorial content.
UK newspaper website traffic for January 2017 (source ABC)
Title | Daily average browsers | m/m % change | y/y % change |
MailOnline | 15,641,619 | 11.8 | 5.98 |
Mirror Group Nationals | 5,453,722 | 9.96 | 13.09 |
The Independent | 4,830,779 | 34.46 | 45.01 |
The Sun | 4,247,921 | 20.16 | 122.41 |
Telegraph | 4,044,489 | 15.31 | -12.3 |
express.co.uk | 1,637,521 | 16.05 | 16.99 |
Metro | 1,590,809 | 17.41 | 12.17 |
dailystar.co.uk | 993,425 | 33.37 | 10.22 |
Manchester Evening News | 785,747 | 20.35 | 13.33 |
Evening Standard | 664,843 | 22.14 | 32.41 |
Liverpool Echo | 555,616 | 21.68 | -0.01 |
Wales Online | 381,989 | 30.45 | 16.82 |
Birmingham Mail | 357,713 | 28.78 | 55.09 |
Chronicle Live | 277,533 | 30.02 | 8.75 |
GazetteLive | 134,347 | 30.1 | 18.9 |
Hull Daily Mail (Web) | 129,197 | 24.03 | |
Nottingham Post (Web) | 113,624 | 23.34 | |
Bristol Post (Web) | 112,586 | 19.83 | |
Daily Post (Wales) | 99,963 | 23.22 | 17.86 |
Plymouth Herald (Web) | 94,161 | 17.33 | |
Stoke Sentinel | 91,204 | 14.75 | |
Derby Telegraph (Web) | 89,697 | 26.17 | |
Coventry Telegraph | 86,979 | 31.15 | 25 |
Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 85,190 | 68.83 | 42.52 |
Leicester Mercury (Web) | 83,230 | 36.98 | |
South Wales Evening Post (Web) | 67,178 | 31.15 | |
Get Surrey | 58,660 | 11.96 | |
Cambridge News (Web) | 52,144 | 23.2 | |
Grimsby Telegraph (Web) | 46,904 | 22.12 | |
Get Reading | 45,404 | 1.99 |
It’s very convenient to explain the sympathetic attitude towards the Third Reich of many British newspapers in terms of news management by Chamberlain. This did of course exist, but as both Wainewright, and Richard Cockett in Twilight of the Truth, make abundantly clear, Rothermere needed no manipulating whatsoever. It’s also necessary to distinguish between papers which were pro-appeasement, such as The Times and the Express, and those which were pro-Nazi, such as the Mail. There’s a significant difference. Indeed, I’ve always wondered why in CJ Sansom’s novel Dominion, which imagines a Britain which lost the war, the quisling prime minister is Lord Beaverbrook rather than Lord Rothermere, who would seem the obvious choice.
By the way, in the Night of the Long Knives Hitler did not murder more than 100 of his political opponents. In point of fact, he instructed the SS to murder more than 100 of his closest and most loyal supporters: the street fighters of the SA. This was because the more radical elements of the SA wanted to have a ‘second revolution’, and Hitler was terrified that this might scare off those elements of big business and the armed forces who were at this point supporting the Nazis. The story was put around by a now totally compliant media that this action was necessary because of homosexual activity in the SA.
Finally, you say that in the Daily Mail during its pro-Brexit propaganda campaign it was ‘ journalists (and one editor in particular) who were calling the shots’ as if the journalists and this particular editor had equal weight. But they obviously don’t. So, to judge by the paper’s coverage of Brexit, either every journalist was an ardent Brexiter, or the remainers thought it advisable either to keep quiet or to follow Dacre’s line