When it comes to money, the Daily Mail (and its Sunday sister title) is the most lucrative title on Fleet Street. The Sun may sell more copies, but 3 million lots of 20p during the week can’t match 2.1 million at 50p. This week Mail executives lifted their skirts a little bit with some extra financial information about the daily everybody loves to hate and buy all that the same time — as they tried to persuade City types that newspapers are far from dead.
OK, at Monday’s investor presentation, it didn’t help when the boss of Associated Newsapers, Kevin Beatty dismissed the Evening Standard by telling his audience that “we are longer burdened by the costs of operating in the London afternoon market”, but well not every newspaper is so succesful financially. But the Standard is under Russian ownership now, so we can move on from all that nonsense.
Anyway, year ago the Mail turned over £716 million, comprising £366 million of circulation revenue and £350 million of advertising income. And remember that was a bad year for advertising. If you want the only comparison that counts, it’s with News Group Newspapers, the company that owns The Sun and the News of the World, and their score was £618 million (although all that could change if only The Sun was 30p).
Guy Zitter who is the managing director of the Mail reckons that every 100,000 new readers would be worth £12 million in profit, if you can get them, and 250,000 would be worth £31 million. And he banged on about how the Mail is hustling for new readers by hitting them with mailshots with offers of a £50 store voucher for anybody who hangs in there for a three month trial. They claim this sort of offer, the only way to get people to buy a newspaper these days, has given them an extra 133,000 readers.
That’s more than the paid-for sale of The Independent, although Zitter reckons it helps that the title targets ‘mid-Britons’ rather than appealing to “a ghetto of Islingtonians and a few social workers” (whichever newspaper can he mean?).
The Mail’s head to head market share with the Express is now at 75 per cent, even with Richard Desmond’s paper priced at a Sun-like 20p. Or as Zitter said, in an effort to wind up Richard “Dirty” Desmond: “The Express as far as I can see has abandoned the field of battle”. And even the title’s overall share of readership across all newspapers has ticked up from 19 to 22 per cent over the last decade, which will please liberals everywhere.
Online the Mail claims about 1 million British people a day visit for their fix of Sienna Miller/Cheryl Cole/Myleene Klass. Nobody else deigns to publish UK daily stats, but when it comes to worldwide daily visitors the Mail is on 2.27 million versus 1.87 million for the next best, The Guardian. So if you assume that Brits are only 40 per cent of a title’s online audience, the next best is at about 750,000. Some way down.
Which is why they reckon it’s worth staying free because the advertising opportunity is so large. Martin Clarke, the online superemo, said he was baffled as to why News International was “throwing in the towel” by going paid-for (a decision likely to provide another boost to the Mail’s online audience). A free website is all good promotional fo r the paper, especially give that 78 per cent of site vistors don’t read the Mail but are “exactly the kind of people who should”.
All we got to do now is start believing in it. Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain is today’s splash, which based on a rather sensible article the Lib Dem leader wrote in 2002 comparing Germany favorably to Britain. As the Lib Dem himself said, he’s gone from being Churchill to Hitler (cue those videos somebody) in a week.
