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Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper with the largest online audience in the world.

Mail Online grew rapidly into one of the most-visited news websites by 2007, when its editors began chasing traffic by posting aggregated news stories, and prioritizing large photo spreads with long headlines to bolster visits. It had reached 154 million unique visitors by late 2013.

Founded in 1896 as a women’s newspaper, the Daily Mail also publishes editions in Scotland and Ireland, and launched The Mail on Sunday in 1982. It opened a New York office to house its online staff in 2011, and much of the Mail Online’s success online has been a result of its growing American audience, which now accounts for a third of all traffic.

In January 2012, the Daily Mail launched an India-specific edition of its website, Mail Online India. That month, MailOnline surpassed The New York Times to become the most popular newspaper website in the world, with over 50 million monthly unique visitors.

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Recent Nieman Lab coverage:

Sept. 28, 2023 / Sarah Scire

The Society of Professional Journalists faces a “dire situation” — The Society of Professional Journalists, known for decades as the oldest and largest professional organization for journalists, is facing an identity crisis on top of a financial one. The flow of membership and conferenc...

Sept. 28, 2023 / Laura Hazard Owen

“It got too expensive to have all the subscriptions”: How people think about paying for news now — A few years back, German publisher Spiegel decided to try something new: A cheaper Spiegel+ digital subscription just for readers under 30. It’s €2.99 per week, compared to €4.99 per week for readers over 30. A...

Sept. 28, 2023 / Hanaa' Tameez

Four disabled journalists on how news outlets can support staffers and audience members with disabilities — Athens — Despite the fact that an estimated 1.3 billion people around the world experience some form of disability, newsrooms are “woefully unprepared” to serve audience members or employ journalists with disabilit...

Sept. 27, 2023 / Mike Ananny

Press freedom means controlling the language of AI — Generative AI poses the biggest threat to press freedom in decades, and journalists should act quickly to organize themselves and radically reshape its power to produce news. The news industry has long been buffeted by e...

Sept. 26, 2023 / Joshua Benton

What is news, anyway? Readers’ answers depend on how much they see people like themselves in the story — What is news, anyway? I don’t mean to get all metaphysical with you on a Tuesday, but it’s not a question with an obvious answer. What’s news to you might not be news to me. Sometimes, when people talk ...

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Primary author: Linda Kinstler. Main text last updated: June 12, 2014.

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