Mail Online generates a ‘marginal profit’from its US-facing pages despite being a relative unknown amongst advertisers, its managing director said today.
The website of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers now drew a third of its audience from the US, James Bromley told the AOP conference this afternoon.
The site, which has a heavy focus on celebrity news, has also begun tailoring some content for its US readership, Bromley said, and used technologies such as geo-tagging to present readers in the US with relevant content.
Display advertising remained of primary importance to Mail Online, he said, as the site was a focused on a free access model which relied on a loyal readership visiting the site several times each day.
Mail Online opened a bureau in Los Angeles in May as part of its bid to expand coverage that will attract US readers, appointing Elliot Wagland, previously the Mail’s online picture editor in London, to oversee the new bureau.
‘Just like many other national newspapers we have partners that represent our US inventory and we optimise how we distribute our inventory in the US but at the moment we are an unknown brand in the US,’he said.
According to data from comScore, Mail Online now ranks as the world’s second-largest English language news site after the New York Times.
‘We are about the eighth largest newspaper in the US market. But you walk into an [advertising] agency and its ‘Daily who?”Bromley told the AOP.
‘That’s going to change as our growth continues in the US market but at the moment we are on a much lower [ad] yield in the US market than we are on in the UK.
‘We are marginally profitable in the US market but that will increase dramatically.”
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