To the competition between NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT) and HuffingtonPost.com, add two British challengers…
Mail Online, the celebrity-laden website of the conservative British Daily Mail tabloid, re-took the global #2 slot from Huffington in March, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) (via BrandRepublic), as it hires editorial and commercial staff in Los Angeles and New York for a U.S. expansion. Guardian.co.uk, meanwhile, is rebooting its ambitions of being a global liberal news voice in the States.
Guardian.co.uk, in particular, is likely hoping to capitalise on any traffic dip that goes with NYTimes.com’s new paid access model. In March, the paper benefitted from curiosity surrounding its new model, plus audience for big global news. If Hitwise’s observation, that NYTimes.com lost up to 15 percent of its users during the switch, is correct, its traffic will likely fall below that of the competitors snapping at its heels.
But it will likely be Mail Online, whose mix of mass-market news, showbiz gossip and bikini pics has seen its domestic UK audience rocket in the last year, which will overtake NYTimes.com before Guardian.co.uk
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