Will Mail Online overtake NYTimes.com?

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

The U.K.'s Daily Mail might not be the most credible source of information, but it is one of the most widely read ones.

Last month, Mail Online cruised past the Huffington Post to become to become the world's second most popular news site, lagging behind only the New York Times.

The numbers--which put nytimes.com's unique monthly visitors at a record 61.96 million, Mail Online's at 39.64 million and HuffPo's at 38.43 million, according to web analytics firm comScore--were based on traffic from March, the last month before the Times started charging readers for unlimited access to its digital offerings, and also a month of explosive international news.

The Times' traffic has since dipped as a result of the new pay model, and now Mail Online is predicting that when the latest traffic stats come in during the next few weeks, it will steal the the Gray Lady's crown.

On a conference call Friday morning announcing half-yearly financial results for the Daily Mail's parent company, chief executive Martin Morgan said Mail Online "may go past the New York Times" with a projected 70 million unique global visitors for the month of May, according to the website journalism.co.uk.

That would appear to be quite a leap from its current figures. But as with all news websites, the Daily Mail has seen bumps these past few months from major international stories like the ongoing Middle East turmoil and deadly tsunami in Japan. And residual royal wedding traffic and the death of Osama bin Laden no doubt contributed to higher web traffic for the site in May.

A spokeswoman for the Times declined to comment on the Mail's prediction--but pointed out that comScore still ranked the Times, with 46.4 global uniques in April, as the world's largest individual news site. (See chart above.) Mail Online was No. 2 in April, with 38.7 million, followed by HuffPo, which also declined to comment for this item, with 35.9 million. (ComScore does not rank sites such as Yahoo! News and the CNN Digital Network, whose traffic surpasses all three, in the same category, and groups Huffpo in with newspapers online.)

ComScore won't release its May numbers until the third week of June, so we'll have to wait until then to see if the Daily Mail's prediction plays out.