Daily Mail’s Subscription Launches in U.S. Asking: Is Taylor Swift Pregnant?
The Daily Mail launched its subscription program, DailyMail+, in the U.S. and Canada today, about a year following its UK and Australia launch.
The plan, which costs £12.99 a month in the UK, will cost $1.99 a month for the first year and $9.99 thereafter in the U.S. The vast majority of the Mail’s online content—about 1,000 to 1,500 new stories are published every day—will remain free, while five to 15 articles will be placed behind the paywall. In the UK, the program has 135,000 subscribers.
The Daily Mail didn’t move faster on the U.S. edition because the opportunity cost of a lost page view in the U.S. is much higher versus programmatic yields in the UK, “because there’s just more advertisers and more auction pressure around the demand so and we sell a lot more programmatic here,” Rich Caccappolo, vice chair, media at DMGT, told AMO. “So any loss of traffic by putting that up, which has been actually really negligible in the UK, would have a higher opportunity cost. We wanted to sort of get a feel for what stories tended to drive that.”
Stories behind the paywall today include “Angels are real, I’ve seen them all my life and have dazzling proof. Here’s where to find them,” and “Is Taylor Swift having a BABY? Revealed: her overheard date night conversation with Travis Kelce that will send fans into a frenzy.”
How many subscribers they’ll get on day one is a mystery, with the newsroom taking guesses ranging from 1,776 (ie, year of the Declaration of Independence) to 1,812 (War of 1812) and anything else, with Caccappolo guaranteeing the winner takes home the most expensive item in the vending machine (possibly a $4 protein bar).
“It’s a balancing act. Your most addicted users are the ones that tend to subscribe—they’re also ones you don’t want to piss off because they see so many pages,” Caccappolo said.
It has some heft to support its ambitions in the U.S. According to Caccappolo, the Daily Mail has roughly 40 million readers in the U.S., about 26 million in the UK and around 70 million in the rest of the world.
“I think we’re still the biggest on Snap, Facebook’s coming back, we are, on any given day, the biggest there. We are the biggest publisher on Tiktok. The number of uniques there and the number of visits are astounding. We don’t make any money off it, but I do think it’s helped our direct traffic in the U.S.” Caccappolo said. The company gets about 650 million TikTok uniques a month. Press Gazette found that the Daily Mail indeed topped TikTok in 2023 and into 2024.
Caccappolo told AMO that the majority of traffic to Daily Mail sites is direct—two-thirds or three-quarters depending on the day—and there was an early focus on direct audience because they found that readers would visit eight to 12 pages if they went directly, versus around 1.2 if they were sent by Facebook, for example.
According to Similarweb, in January, roughly 47% of the visits came direct with about a third coming from organic search.
Screens are posted in the newsrooms showing where people are navigating from the home page and what they are reading, with the idea being that should readership start to erode, they can take actions, tweak a headline or change out the stories leading the page.
The new subscription plan is a part of DMGT’s priority to diversify revenue streams over the past few years, though programmatic advertising continues to dominate.
“We have video stuff, we have YouTube video, we have podcasts, we have commerce and licensing, so we have diversified. And our paper, believe it or not, still sells. It makes a lot of money. We still sell 1.1 million papers on a Saturday, 800,000 per day, and that’s actually held up.”
