Mail Online coming to Australia in joint venture with Mi9
Nine Network’s digital arm Mi9 has announced a new joint venture with the world’s most-visited news website, the Mail Online giving the British newspaper a local presence down under.
The surprise announcement comes just a month after Nine bought out partner Microsoft to take full control of Mi9, and will see the site use its local editorial team to create content for the Mail Online.
Recruitment for the new venture, which will be staffed by 50 journalists, will start immediately, and the www.dailymail.com.au URL will go live in early 2014. The team will be based alongside the NineMSN unit in the company’s Sydney base, with ad sales coming out of Mi9.
Mi9 CEO Mark Britt told a press conference this morning the aim was to make the brand “the leading mainstream newspaper site in Australia,” and build the largest digital editorial team in Australia, and said it would not go behind a paywall, as Fairfax and News Corp have done.
As I put on twitter on the 8th of October.
“News”.
What great news. And good to see Mi9 doing something with a bit of balls. I’m not that au fait with the English site but hopefully it’ll be a little more impartial than the drivelling left of The Guardian and Fairfax, and the doddering right of the Murdoch presses.
@JohnB – Impartial? You have no idea how wrong you are. MailOnline is basically where news.com.au get all their stories from.
But how will this effect house prices?
John B: Daily Mail is one of the most conservative of the British mastheads –if not THE most conservative. Here in .au the closest we have to the MailOnine is news.com.au which, like MO, specialises in low rent, celebrity-obsessed, clickbait “news” . In fact, apart from the fact that news.com.au’s site design is better, they seem to be taking a leaf straight out of the Mail ONline playbook when it comes to their content mix. WIll be interesting to see how those two go head to head.
Let’s hope editing of the Australian Daily Mail is better than the UK version. How many typos and inconsistencies can you get away with from one news site?
@ Minnie. Thanks for that. And by what you’ve made it out to be, it sounds effing terrible.
Danni, ask pagemasters.
cause we need another right wing mouthpiece
I can cope with the typos…it’s the vacuous, celeb-obsessed non-stories and the pandering to the darker side of middle English bigotry and paranoia that makes my eyeballs want to pivot in my head and vomit back into my brain. That said, it’s strangely compelling….possibly out of morbid curiosity.
For all of those feeling negatively about the content direction of Daily Mail, the fact is that it is currently delivering significant user numbers from Australia so there are consumers out there who want this sort of content. And these are the sort of consumers that buy things….the sort of consumers who sellers want to reach!
Its a good move by MI9 to increase their news/lifestyle readership and giving 50 journo’s a job can be no bad thing. In turn, this will increase advertising opportunities for MI9 and from where i’m sitting, anything that dilutes the revenue that Fairfax and News are sharing can only be a good thing
Completely agree Connor, the Daily Mail is bigoted, middle England, anti-anyone foreign, brainswashing rubbish aimed mainly at female readership. I often see pieces I’ve read turn up in our Newsltd papers the next day. My mum reads it at home.
However, their online site is very compelling for a gossip fix, female articles, mummy articles and general opinion pieces which are fun to read if I can’t sleep!
watching the daily mail and news ltd race to the dark, dirty bottom is going to be agonising. ultimate digital car crash.
So it sounds like there is quite a different feel & strategy between the Mail in print and the Mail Online? Is that right? What is it about the Mail Online that makes it so successful? Is it just the celeb gossip?