Thursday, 30 June 2011

The most popular stories on the Mail's website

Last week, this blog highlighted a MailOnline article about Kim Kardashian crossing a road. On the same day, Georgina Littlejohn was breathlessly explaining how Kim's sister Kourtney had been seen in 'high wedged sandals'. In an article which was essentially 'woman goes out wearing shoes', Littlejohn wrote:

the teeny tiny reality TV star must have been feeling particularly short yesterday judging by her shoes.

That same day, the latest ABCe figures showed that 77,250,993 unique visitors went to the Mail's website in May 2011, making it by far the most visited UK newspaper website (the Guardian was second, with 51.3m monthly visitors)

As this blog has pointed out several times before, MailOnline publisher Martin Clarke told the Press Gazette in 2009:

"It does annoy me that people say its all driven by search and showbiz stories because it’s actually not driven by either…

"Showbiz is less that 25 per cent of traffic. News is far more important to us that showbiz. News is what drives our site."

So, in the wake of the ABCe numbers, what does the Mail's 'Site's most read' section tell us about the popularity of the Mail's news and showbiz stories?

Here is the list of the ten most popular articles on their website so far today:


And the most popular over the last seven days:


And the most popular over the 30 days:


It shows that the Mail's news stories - what 'drives their site' - are less popular than 'woman dyes her hair', 'woman goes to Wimbledon' and 'footballer goes to Glastonbury'.

Compare that to the most read stories on the BBC website at time of writing:

Posted by MacGuffin at 18:00
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2 comments:

  1. GGMP30 June 2011 at 22:19

    Let's not forget that many of those views are people looking at it simply because some of the stuff they write is so ridiculous and must be seen e.g. Diana at 50 has probably got a hundred thousand views out of ridicule at the Mail.

    ReplyDelete
  2. hannanibal1 July 2011 at 10:10

    @GGMP
    I couldn't agree more. I have to say, for the sake of my own sanity, that most people who visit the site don't agree with the agenda being pushed. Me and my mates read it so we can have something to laugh/cry about.

    ReplyDelete

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