Sue Douglas, hired seven months ago to take charge of Trinity Mirror's Sunday People, is leaving the company, and the People.co.uk website she launched in November is being scrapped.

Trinity Mirror is closing People.co.uk with "immediate effect" and Douglas and her team of four will leave the company at the end of January.

Rupert Howell, the former ITV senior executive who was Douglas's partner in the original Sunday People bid talks and joined the company with her last year, will remain at Trinity Mirror as group transformation director.

The company said that the website, the first dedicated site the Sunday People has had, did not hit the traffic targets that had been expected over the three months since launch.

People.co.uk, a multi-million pound digital offering dubbed "Buzzfeed for grown-ups", went live on 5 November.

Douglas, former Sunday Express editor who had held talks with Trinity Mirror about taking a majority stake in the Sunday People, was hired in June last year to launch a seven-day digital version of the Sunday People.

"These decisions are never easy to make and I would like to thank Sue and her team for all their hard work and creativity," said Simon Fox, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror. "The idea of the site was to bring the People brand to life across seven days but it simply hasn't attracted the audience that we had hoped for."

The Daily Mirror publisher has previously said that its digital projects, such as the successful UsVsTh3m, have to produce results or they will not continue to be backed.

"Our aim is to become one of the UK's leading multi-media publishers and we will only achieve this by experimenting with new digital ideas," added Fox.

Douglas was hired to be publishing director of wholly-owned Trinity Mirror subsidiary Sunday Brands.

The subsidiary included the Sunday Mail in Scotland, Wales on Sunday and regional titles the Sunday Mercury in Birmingham and Sunday Sun in Newcastle.

Her role later changed to focus on launching a Sunday People digital offering.

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