UK remains commercial focus for Mail Online, despite huge international traffic, director claims

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Mail Online's commercial focus will remain on the UK even though three quarters of its audience is from elsewhere in the world, its editorial director has claimed.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk Martin Clarke said that despite high US traffic, the UK remained the focus.

"All our efforts are focused on the UK traffic, we judge ourselves on that growth because they are the people our advertisers, at the moment, are interested in," he said.

"No British newspaper website - and we all have masses of traffic from abroad particularly the States - has really figured out how you effectively monetise it.

"In the short term the traffic we are interested in is the UK traffic. I take the view that if you produce a good site for UK users, then the international traffic will come automatically.

"The reason we get so much traffic from America is because we have interesting and compelling content that people abroad want to read."

Other UK paper's are keen to develop their US profiles. Business Week reported that the Guardian is looking to cash in on its growing North American presence, adding additional reporters to its US editorial team and targeting US advertisers. Mail Online released impressive traffic figures, last week, suggesting that with nearly 12 million unique users the site was second only to the Guardian as the UK's most popular newspaper website.

The ABCE audit also produced two other interesting sets of data. The Mail - the only paper to report a geographical breakdown of the figures - reported receiving 78 per cent of its unique users - 9.2 million visitors - and 58 per cent of its page impressions in July from outside the UK.

Data from Nielson/NetRatings ranked the Mail as the top UK newspaper site for US unique users in July - receiving 4.1 million unique American users - just ahead of the Guardian and almost doubling the amount of US visitors received by the Telegraph.

The proliferation of UK news sources as a regular port of call for inhabitants of other countries is well documented - yet a specific breakdown of where a site's traffic originates is rare.

City University London lecturer Neil Thurman last month published a study stating that UK newspaper websites received an average of 36 per cent of their readers from the US.

His study added that the Drudge Report was the most important referrer of US readers to UK news websites, accounting - on average - for 25 per cent of US traffic to a UK newspaper source.

Mr Clarke added that the US was supplying the loin-share of the international traffic to the Mail. However, he said the site was a long way short of getting 25 per cent of its US traffic from Drudge referrals, despite the last month seeing the Mail and its Evening Standard site having nearly 60 stories between them linked to by Drudge.

Large aggregating sites - like Drudge and Perez Hilton - spiked traffic around certain stories, he added, but were more effective at raising site profile and making it part of a US user's surfing habit.

International growth, he added, had come at roughly the same rate as domestic traffic and more as a result of organic search than linking from aggregation sites.