Daily Mail US editor-in-chief Katie Davies said her biggest revelation when returning to the brand last year was realising “how incredibly strong” its loyal readership is.
Davies previously spent seven years as a senior editor with DailyMail.com in New York but left to help first The Independent and then The Times expand their US operations.
She came back to lead the Daily Mail’s US operation in September and spoke to Press Gazette six months into the editor-in-chief role at her New York office.
Davies noted that her last employers had “very different businesses”: a free model at The Independent and a paywall at The Times.
“So coming back to the Mail at the time when the Mail is launching a paywall was really interesting, because I could bring the learnings from both of those past experiences.
“But I think the thing that I hadn’t quite appreciated from afar was how incredibly strong the Daily Mail’s loyal readers are, and how great a position it puts the brand in, because we’re not completely reliant on social and search like other websites are, we’ve got that loyal readership who feel very strongly about our product and tell us very often if we change anything. But that just allows us to kind of experiment more and it’s really put us in such an exciting position.”
Around half of the Mail’s traffic in both the UK and US comes directly instead of via search or social, according to Similarweb. For comparison, a third of traffic at closest UK competitor The Sun is direct.
Davies said: “I feel very privileged and lucky to be here and I think we’re really lucky to be in a position where we have that because I know a lot of other sites have the great social reach, have the great search reach but converting that to brand loyalty and return traffic is the million dollar question.”
However Davies told Press Gazette that while 46% of US traffic came from direct sources in February according to Similarweb, internal metrics in recent months have put this figure as high as 60%.
She also noted that branded search makes up a quarter of all search traffic “demonstrating that a significant portion of readers actively seek out the Daily Mail”.
The Daily Mail’s website launched in the UK in May 2004, began targeting Americans six years later with the opening of a newsroom in Los Angeles, and switched to the DailyMail.com URL in the US in 2014.
In February, the Daily Mail was the twelfth biggest news website in the US by visits according to Similarweb, with 94.8 million visits (down 19% year on year and 14% month on month) leading to 284 million page views.
Mail+ launches in US: ‘It wasn’t slow, it was deliberate’
On 25 February DailyMail.com rolled out its partial paywall Mail+ in the US and Canada. Mail+ first went live on Mail Online in the UK in January last year, later expanding into Australia. It now has more than 130,000 paying subscribers who receive access to a small amount of paywalled articles each day across many of its core verticals.
Davies said: “One of the questions lots of people ask is: ‘Why now? You could have done a paywall ages ago. Are the Mail late to the party?’ And I think that rather than being slow, it was very deliberate.
“We wanted to make sure that we could offer something to these loyal readers that really did enhance their experience and offered something new, but also didn’t undermine the free product because the free product is is where the majority of our readers are and we expect them to stay.”
In the US so far, around 25 stories each day (or about 5% of total output) are available to paying Mail+ subscribers only.
Davies and her team are experimenting with the types of content that are getting gated but she said “quality is the most important thing across all subject areas. So added-value stories – there has to be an exclusive element. There has to be something you’re not getting anywhere else because why would you spend $2 on it otherwise?”
In addition the Mail’s core verticals are key, she added, including showbiz, true crime, royals – “less here maybe than in the UK, but to a certain degree” – health, politics, science and sport.
Several big US names have been added to the Mail’s roster of columnists including Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank (the American version of Dragons’ Den) and The Biggest Loser personal trainer Jillian Michaels, with some of those articles put behind the paywall.
Davies said the response to Mail+ in its first three weeks in the US “has been overwhelming and our numbers have gone beyond our expectations.
“We were quickly reforecasting but it’s really great to see. And I think that the office is really motivated by it… traffic is holding up, and it’s robust, and people are seeing that this can work and they can do both.”
Daily Mail is ‘one stop shop’ for news consumers with 200-strong US team
Overall Davies said DailyMail.com appeals to a wide range of people as a “one stop shop” for news.
“You come to the homepage and you get politics, you get showbiz, you get Femail, you get science, health, sport, money, all of these departments… And that’s why our homepage readership is so strong.”
She added that the Mail doesn’t “serve up news as medicine to people or tell them you have to eat your vegetables” and is “not snobby, not lecturing – it’s news you want to talk about in the pub with your friends”.
Davies also said that both globally and in the US the Mail is “a brand that tells it like it is. We’re not beholden to one side. We’ll give either side a bloody nose. And I think that people really crave that in America: a really fun, independent newsbrand.”
Davies said DailyMail.com went into the presidential election and new Trump administration, which is seeing news organisations trying to keep up with a “dizzying number” of executive actions, “from a place of confidence” after partnering with 2024’s “most accurate pollster”.
“We went into it with just really strong political coverage and a number of exclusives, and we really want to push that and keep getting those exclusives and breaking stories in DC, too,” Davies said.
DailyMail.com currently has a team of about ten people in Washington DC, led by DC editor Kelly Laco, where it is actively recruiting.
Overall it has a team of more than 200 journalists in the US. Its biggest US newsrooms are in New York and Los Angeles but it now also has reporters based in Texas, Colorado, Florida and elsewhere as it aims to build geographical reach and not be an “inward-looking, New York-based operation” as Davies put it. “We’re trying to build in the middle.”
Media and real estate among Daily Mail US expansion areas
So far this year DailyMail.com has also expanded its features department, Femail vertical, created a media correspondent role and launched a real estate section, among other new hires (primarily those described by Davies as “scoop-getters”).
Davies said media and real estate were two topics that “could really do with the Daily Mail treatment”.
The media vertical is focusing on political pundits as celebrities and personalities, with a lot of comings and goings at the major TV networks this year.
And real estate, Davies said, is “obviously very fascinating to everybody who lives in America and is struggling to buy a home or just likes to see how other people live, the voyeuristic element”.
Of both verticals, she said: “Our approach is to test and learn… but with the growth that we’re seeing, we’d really like to double down and hire more in both.”
She described a “slow and steady expansion” now taking place after she spent her first few months in the role looking at how everything works and assessing what DailyMail.com was missing.
Meanwhile in the UK double-digit job cuts have been taking place this year in the final stage of merging the Mail’s print and digital teams.
Davies said that this round of redundancies was part of a “bigger transformation” in the UK and has “actually had no impact here, because this office has always been online focused, so we’ve not had that pressure”.
Of the US, she also said: “There’s not been any kind of specific area that we’ve cut back. Unfortunately, making cuts is sometimes the way it goes in this industry, but I think we’ve actually done a pretty good job in the US of withstanding that and the US is so important to our business, it’s somewhere where we want to expand and invest.”
‘Everything new we do must be told in a Daily Mail style’
Video and audio are another area of expansion including political podcast MAGAland (with which Davies noted it was “lovely to see two women leading a podcast in that space which is traditionally very male”). Head of publishing – podcasts Lucy Robson is based in New York and Davies said they are “really pushing into America as the next podcast goal”.
Although Davies noted that the Mail is not too reliant on social referrals, she mentioned Snapchat and Tiktok as two huge platforms where they are reaching people who are “not necessarily the demographics that others are seeing coming to their sites”.
The Mail has more than 28 million followers across its Tiktok channels, ahead of Facebook on 22 million, with Snapchat on 14 million and Youtube on 4.6 million.
Several publishers at Press Gazette’s Media Strategy Network USA event in New York last week suggested they are no longer particularly bothered about Snapchat following the dominance of Tiktok.
But Davies said of the platform: “We still get a huge number of followers, so we still think the strength is absolutely there, and we’re still as invested in it as we ever have been.
“It’s another great platform where you can reach maybe a demographic who aren’t necessarily consuming media in the same way as others and short-form video is definitely something that I think we found that we excel in, and we want to lean in and push that in any platform where we can.”
Ultimately Davies said her vision for expansion in areas like podcasts, video and visual storytelling strand Deep Dive is “growth, but it’s keeping the brand at the centre of everything we do. So those… will still be wedded to subjects that are the Daily Mail and news told in a Daily Mail style, but innovative, and they will bring something new to the market we haven’t had before.”
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