Mail Online

MailOnline

Web address	dailymail.co.uk
Commercial?	Yes
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	English
Owner	Daily Mail and General Trust
Alexa rank	101 (February 2014)[1]
Current status	Active

MailOnline (also known as dailymail.co.uk) is the website of the Daily Mail, a tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom, and of its sister paper The Mail on Sunday. MailOnline is a division of DMG Media, part of Associated Newspapers Ltd, and is one of the most visited newspaper websites in the world,^[2] with over 130 million visitors per month as of July 2013.^[3]

The website has an international reach, featuring separate home pages for the UK, USA, India and Australia.^[4] While the MailOnline maintains the conservative editorial stance of the print edition, much of the content featured on the website is produced exclusively for the MailOnline and is not published in the Daily Mail.

Reach

The website reached 128.59 million unique web browsers in May 2013, up from 105.72 million in August 2012,^[5] according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.^[6] That figure makes it the world's most popular news site.

Globally, MailOnline was the most visited newspaper website, according to ComScore, whose methodology gave the site 50.1 million unique visitors for October 2012, ahead of the previous leader, The New York Times website, which received 48.7 million visitors in the same month.^[7] MailOnline has subsequently recorded increasingly more readership, both for events such as the birth of Prince George in 2013, but also overall.^[3]

Content

MailOnline features a broad mixture of international news, and carries mainly UK-focussed coverage of sport, personal finance, travel, science and lifestyle editorial. As of August 2013, it publishes between 550-600 article per day,^[8] the editorial stance of which broadly reflects that of the Daily Mail, being to the right wing of mainstream British politics and typically supporting the UK Conservative Party.^[9] MailOnline articles tend to be dominated by pictures rather than long-form journalism.^[2] A major component of the website is its entertainment news, often featuring celebrities such as Kim Kardashian^[10] or members of the British Royal Family such as the Duchess of Cambridge.^[11] It is estimated that 25% of the traffic received by the website is purely to access the entertainment and gossip stories.^[12]

For its readers in the United States, MailOnline devotes much of its content to news and entertainment. This is in contrast to the Daily Mail print newspaper, which has no presence in that country.^[12]

The website allows users to create accounts in order to comment on articles, and also allows anyone to express anonymous approval or disapproval of comments made. The site also publishes statistics about this activity.^[13] The house rules state that the monitors usually remove inappropriate content in full,^[14] although they do reserve the right to edit comments.^[15] The site also does not allow comments on some articles for legal reasons.^[16]

Claimed inaccuracies

• September 2009: Geek.com reported that a story posted in MailOnline about a solar panel made from human hair^[17] was a hoax.^[18] Engineer Edward Craig Hyatt stated that it was not possible to use human hair in any configuration to generate electricity when exposed to light.^[19]
• June 2010: The Guardian reported that MailOnline had published an inaccurate story about an iPhone 4 recall, based on a Twitter message from a parody account by a Steve Jobs impersonator.^[20] MailOnline realised its error and removed the article.^[21]
• In October 2011, MailOnline and several other news sources published standby articles on Amanda Knox's trial prematurely. The articles reported an upholding of the guilty verdict before the judge had finished announcing the reversal of the guilty verdict.^{[22][23][24][25]} Mail Online stated the article was removed within 90 seconds and apologized. The article became the subject of a Press Complaints Commission complaint that noted the article's reporting of events and reactions that had not taken place and said that was "not acceptable" but commented positively on the handling of the error.^{[26][27][28][29]}
• January 2012: ABC News Radio reported the falsity of a story "repeated by numerous media outlets" concerning a supposed naming by Advertising Age of a campaign by singer Rihanna for fashion house Armani as the "sexiest ad of the year." The story, Ad Age said, "seemed to have originated with the British tabloid the Daily Mail.^[30] Huffington Post removed the story and apologized.^[31]
• January 2012: Robert Hart-Fletcher, of the charity "Kids and Media", told BeefJack, a gaming magazine, that quotes attributed to him were "completely fabricated" across a range of British media, most prominently the Daily Mail and the BBC.^[32]
• April 2012: MailOnline published an article about a dentist who extracted her ex-boyfriend's teeth; the piece was later exposed as a hoax by MSNBC.com. The article appeared under the byline of reporter Simon Tomlinson, who said he does not know where the story came from.^[33][34][35]
• April 2012: The Christian Science Monitor reported that MailOnline had misused an opinion piece published in Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper and translated into English by Al Arabiya. The original article claimed "Egypt's parliament was considering a piece of legislation sponsored by Islamists to allow men to have sex with their wives after their death." The Daily Mail, wrote Monitor staff writer Dan Murphy, "distorted the original claim from a proposal to a done deal: 'Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives', the tabloid claimed, apparently having misunderstood the original Al Arabiya translation. "^[36]
• October 2012: Actor Nicolas Cage received an apology and damages for a false story in Mail Online about allegations of tax evasion.^[37]

Sources

In March 2012, the Poynter Institute published an article criticising the MailOnline for not giving proper attribution to the sources of some article content.

"It’s not just that they steal stories so blatantly[...] They go out of their way to fuck over journalists and they reap the benefits by becoming the most highly trafficked newspaper on the Internet. How hard would it be to put in one link to an article?"

Martin Clarke, editor of MailOnline, said, "We will soon be introducing features that will allow us to link easily and prominently to other sites when further recognition of source material is needed."^[38] However, by July 2013, MailOnline articles, including main articles, still do not contain any links to original sources or tips.^[39]

Awards

In 2012, the Mail Online received the chairman's award for Online Media.^[40]

In 2012, the Daily Mail and Mail Online won "eight awards, including newspaper of the year, campaign of the year and hat-trick for Craig Brown".

"I'd like to pay the most enormous tribute to all of the journalists on the Daily Mail and Mail Online, our new very successful, equal partner," Dacre said after accepting the newspaper of the year award.^[41]

In 2011, the first year of the Online Media awards, Mail Online won for "Best Brand Development." ^[42]

References

External links

• Official website
• Mail on Sunday
• DailyMail U.S