The Guardian / The Atlantic Wire
New figures from comScore show that Mail Online, the website of the UK-based Daily Mail, passed The Huffington Post in March to become the second-most visited “newspaper” site in the world. (The Atlantic Wire notes that this category includes the Web-only HuffPo but not other types of news sites.) Mail Online’s traffic grew to 39.6 million unique visitors; Huffington Post was at 38.4 million. The Guardian reports, “Mail Online has grown exponentially in the past three years, in part due to its showbiz-laden front page, but also because of its focus on US news. Associated [Newspapers, the Daily Mail’s owner] has been hiring editorial staff in New York and Los Angeles to feed its online news operation.” The New York Times is still first by a wide margin. || Related: figures from MediaWeek.
CORRECTION: This post originally stated that Mail Online had passed Huffington Post in news site rankings, but the story is based on comScore’s ranking of “newspaper” sites.