Associated Newspapers will relaunch Mail Online “in the near future”, mad.co.uk reports.
In December’s ABCe figures, Mail Online closed within 2.3 million monthly users of Guardian Unlimited — the closest any competitor has ever come to catching the market-leading newspaper web site.
When the December figures were released late last month, Mail Online editorial director Martin Clarke told mad.co.uk he would be disappointed if the Associated title didn’t close the gap even further in January — and he would have had a pretty good idea of the unaudited January figures by then.
But the Guardian’s Tom Turcan poked back, telling mad.co.uk: “Really it must be an embarrassment for them, a mid-market brand, that they are not bigger than we are.”
So January’s web traffic figures, which are due to be published at the end of this month, should be very interesting indeed.
The Sun has already claimed huge traffic to its exclusive online video of Amy Winehouse and it will be interesting to see whether the recent relaunch of the Independent can reverse the year-on-year traffic dip that Comscore recorded for that site in December.
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