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The publisher of the Daily Mail plans to put a small selection of MailOnline articles behind a paywall each day for UK readers from early next year, in a pivot towards a “freemium” subscription model aimed at driving revenues.
As part of the changes, MailOnline, one of the world’s most popular news sites, will charge users in its home market to read a select 10-15 articles a day, according to a person familiar with the plans — although the vast majority of the nearly 1,500 stories published by the site every day will remain free-to-read.
MailOnline’s pivot to a “freemium” subscription model, which is expected to launch as early as January next year, takes inspiration from German daily tabloid Bild, which has 675,000 subscribers after beginning to offer some paid-for content a decade ago.
Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail and General Trust, has previously spoken publicly about the possibility of introducing some paid-for content on the site. DMGT had been in the running to buy the Telegraph until a debt deal between the Barclay brothers, the paper’s owners, and an Abu Dhabi-backed bidder halted the auction process.
The partial paywall move, which was first reported by the Telegraph, will mark a big strategic shift for MailOnline, which was one of the last holdouts against making people pay for its stories.
The change will only affect MailOnline readers in the UK, where the site has 23.9mn monthly users and ranks as the second most popular news site behind the BBC, according to Ipsos Iris. MailOnline’s US readers will not be affected.
Daily Mail declined to comment.
Digital news publishers have been hit by falling traffic from social media sites and a decline in advertising revenues. Last month, Reach, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher of titles including the Mirror and Express, announced it was cutting a further 450 jobs, about a tenth of its workforce, citing a sharp drop in traffic from Facebook after changes to its news service.
Since its launch two decades ago, MailOnline has mainly functioned as a separate operation to the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, but earlier this year bosses announced journalists would have to work more across the three titles.
DMGT’s first foray into paid-for digital content came in 2019 with the launch of the Mail+ app, which offered subscribers exclusive video and podcast content, but the app’s content has since been slimmed down and it has been rebranded to Mail+ Editions, offering users a first glance of the paper after it is published.
