Who Reads the Mail Online?

Now the thing is if you run a company that makes radio-controlled hair curlers and you want to put an ad in the paper to stimulate sales, there’s nothing to stop you contacting a daily newspaper’s ads section and, assuming your product is not associated with escort services or bondage whips or something, they’d be delighted to accept it for a fee.

But that is not the way most big companies do it. A big company will use a media buying agency, who places the ad on the company’s behalf, and tries to advise on most effective marketing outlets for the product based upon evidence and statistics. Just because the MD of a company swears by Gardener’s World does not mean that’s the most appropriate place to advertise a hair curler, so a big company will try and be more scientific about it and will use a supposedly unbiased professional agent for the job.

On some publicity from a media buying agency I was intrigued by what it had to say about the Mail. Or actually not so much the Mail as the Mail Online. The Mail paper version is fairly much as one expect: median age of readership fifty-seven, preponderance of social classes C1 and C2 with fair amours of disposable income, no surprises there. 

What’s more intriguing is the Mail Online. This has high readership, it is possibly the most read online newspaper in the world, and according to the media buying group has a high click-through rate from people in their thirties and forties via social media such as Facebook and Twitter and with an especially high concentration in the USA. So who are these people? So far as the media buyers are concerned it doesn’t matter who they are, they and their customers will be looking to tick the right boxes to say they have directed their advertising at the most appropriate audience, if you asked too many intellectual questions you probably wouldn’t be doing that job in the first place. The question is for people like Cy and me, who find it intriguing and puzzling.

What is fairly unlikely is that the people who are clicking through are reading the articles. I think that’s unlikely because much of what is there is domestic to the UK, and I cannot believe that thirty- to forty-somethings in America are rushing to look at UK news, whatever paper it’s in. But if you look at the Mail Online the right-hand column is entirely filled with stories about celebrities, many of whom you will never have heard of and even if you were into celebrities you still may not have heard of them as a great number of them are known, if they are known at all, only in America.

It’s also entirely possible – even likely I would think – that if the Mail Online pages detect that your internet service provider is US-based it will send out different articles on its front page from what it does if your ISP is UK-based.

But still it raises the question: who posts links to Mail articles on their Facebook and Twitter pages, especially given that in the UK the median age is fifty-seven with a preponderance of social classes C1 and C2 (who will be considerably less likely to have a Facebook or Twitter page that would many other sections of the population)? There are of course those who post links saying, ‘Have you seen this? It’s outrageous’ or disgraceful or amusing or whatever. I and others see a fair number of these being posted round quite frequently. Similarly there will be those who post links because they want to point out something to their friends that they especially agree with. But these two types won’t account for much, the second type definitely not, the first there are quite a lot of but not so so many.

Perhaps it’s the celebrities. Are they what is generating the links?  They will certainly get a lot of Google click-throughs, which will be one reason why they’re there on the page to begin with.  

But it’s intriguing altogether – at least I find it so. Clearly the Mail Online is doing it right in terms of getting a very high hit-rate from what appears to be high-spending younger-age groups, but who are the people that form the bulk of this and what are they looking at?  That’s what I’d be fascinated to know.

As regards the hard-copy paper, that median age of fifty-seven is a bit higher than it was a few years ago; when I last looked it was fifty-three. The same people getting older, almost certainly, which itself is a bit interesting, it means that within not too many years the Mail is going to need a major change of format and emphasis.  It won’t just yet, there are plenty of grey-hairs available to fill the tills for now, but I’m quite sure the management will have their mind on the future and I will be interested to see how they swing this. Possibly that celebrity focus in the online version is a pointer to the future for the hard copy paper. I shall continue to observe with interest.