Mail Online has lost almost a tenth of its global audience and advertising revenue growth has slumped following Facebook’s move to deprioritise news appearing on users’ timelines.
Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT), the parent company of Mail Online, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, saw its share price tumble by 7% as investors reacted to the forecast of a revenue slowdown in the second half of its financial year because of tough advertising and property markets.
The company said Mail Online lost almost 1.5 million daily global unique browsers in the six months to the end of March, to 13.6 million, a fall of 9%. The fall in traffic led to Mail Online’s revenue growth dropping to 2% year on year to £61m.
Revenue growth was running at 28% year on year, according to DMGT’s results for its last financial year to the end of September. Mail Online says that a fairer measure is underlying revenue performance, which has fallen from 20% to 5% growth, which strips out factors including foreign exchange fluctuations.
Mail Online is one of many websites to feel the impact of a major overhaul of Facebook’s news feed algorithm in January.
Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, needed to refocus on “meaningful social interactions” and prioritise content shared by friends and family, reducing the amount of content appearing from publishers and brands that were “crowding out the personal moments”.
In September, DMGT lauded a successful broadening of the reach of Mail Online, most notably through Facebook and Snapchat, saying the site hit operating profitability in the final quarter of its last financial year.
On Thursday, the company said its focus was on growing direct visitors to Mail Online but that “indirect traffic, notably via search and social platforms”, had reduced significantly.
“There has been a reduction in indirect traffic via the likes of Facebook and Google,” Tim Collier, the chief financial officer at DMGT, said at a presentation to analysts. “This is an industry-wide issue but we continue to outperform the market. Mail Online has an excellent track record and a clear strategy to prioritise direct traffic to both the homepage and the app, and this continues to grow and is a key reason for our outperformance.”
