Digital subscriptions are growing fast at the Daily Mail, where its Mail+ partial paywall recently passed 250,000 subscribers. And driving this is an approach optimised for “continuous and constant development” through testing and learning, says DMG Media’s MD, digital subscriptions, Tom Lowe.
Launched in the UK in January 2024 — then rolled out into Australia last October and into North America this March — Mail+ is the Daily Mail’s latest revenue diversification effort. And with a launch goal of reaching one million paying subscribers by 2029, expectations are high.
“We’re the biggest printed paper and the biggest commercial news website in the UK and want to be similarly competitive with the number of subscribers we have. So, the goal has always been ambitious,” Lowe admits.
Success for Mail+ is not just about subscriber numbers, however. Also important KPIs are readership breadth, depth of engagement and — despite Mail+ offering an ad-light experience — incremental digital ad revenue.
“Mail+ has never been about replacing ad revenue,” he insists. “We have always been confident that, in the long run, it can help us grow ad revenue by enabling us to sell packages to target our most loyal users.”
Content selection
To go back a step, Mail+ offers paid-for access to a daily curated selection of 25 to 30 pieces of premium content from the Mail’s core verticals — columnists, showbiz, royals, money, health, sports and real-life — designed to appeal to its most engaged digital readers.
Some of these stories are exclusive to Mail+. All are badged with a little blue ‘M+’.
With no editorial teams of its own, Mail+ uses content created by wider editorial teams, some of which is exclusive, guided by three Mail+ global editors — one in each of the geographic regions where it has launched.
Also playing a central role is Celia Duncan, recently promoted from Daily Mail women’s editor to global women’s editor — underlining the significance of content from the Mail’s Femail, Inspire and Secrets & Lives sections as a Mail+ subscriptions driver.
Mail+ sits alongside two other main digital products. One is MailOnline (known down under as Daily Mail Australia and as DailyMail.com in Canada and the US), which publishes around 1,500 articles daily with most available free and in the six months October 2024 — March 2025 attracted approximately 40m UK monthly users and 124m globally (Source: DMG Media / Lotus).
The other is Mail+ Editions, the replica newspaper app for mobile phones and tablets, which today has 92,000 subscribers paying £12.99 per month.
“The idea for a partial paywall reflected a desire to find a new digital product that would both appeal to the Mail’s most enthusiastic readers and provide us with clear potential to scale,” says Lowe.
Subs tech
Fair enough. But given how much sooner other news publishers put up paywalls, Mail+ might strike some as a bit of a johnny-come-lately.
Yet Lowe, who joined DMG Media in 2022 from The Times, where he was director of subscriptions & business planning, insists that the timing was considered and delivered a number of benefits — notably, hitting the ground running unencumbered by legacy tech.
How best to capitalise on the Mail’s loyal and engaged digital audience while at the same time minimising the risk of subscriber drop-off has been a key priority from Mail+’s inception.
“One of the big decisions we made before launch was to take a little longer launching it, putting the infrastructure in place that would allow us to test and innovate really quickly,” Lowe explains.
“We could have launched within a month or so with a basic product.
“Instead, we decided to wait so we knew we would be able to continue to test pricing or products or layouts and designs, etcetera, to be able to continue to push forwards once we had launched by keeping trying things on an on-going basis.”
The “right infrastructure” meant having in place the right people and the right technology.
“A lot of publishers, because they launched their paywalls ten years ago, are stuck with ten-year-old tech. By being a later mover into the space, we’ve partnered with best-in-class providers for technology that allows us to test and learn very quickly,” he explains.
The “right people” meant bringing experts who knew what to test and when from day one and, as important, ring-fencing them so they would focus solely on Mail+ — specifically, acquiring and retaining more subscribers and creating a better experience and content.
Test & learn
As a result, Lowe continues, test and development happened more quickly than might otherwise have been the case.
In fact, between launch and October 2024, Mail+ evolved through 50 or so tests and experiments. And it continues to do so with live sharing of lessons between its three geographic markets.
Test and learn shaped the price strategy, for example, driving the adjustment of the UK launch offer — free for the first month then £4.99pcm after — to £1.99pcm for 12 months then £6.99.
(In Australia and North America, the price throughout has been $1.99pcm for 12 months followed by $9.99.)
Test and learn optimised user experience, too (and still does) — from shaping which content is Mail+ content and how and where Mail+ content appears on the page to Mail+’s adoption of its ad-light proposition.
“At launch in the UK, the advertising experience for subscribers and non-subscribers was the same,” Lowe explains.
“One of the first tests we did was offering an ad-light experience with 80% fewer ads. When we tested that and found it resonated well with our subscribers and helped acquisition and retention, we introduced it then we kept it when we launched elsewhere.”
It’s all about creating a premium advertising environment for brands in which readers are both more loyal and more deeply engaged.
“While Mail+ is on one side of the paywall and MailOnline on the other, both are intimately linked as part of the same whole, meaning that a great MailOnline experience will result in a great Mail+ experience,” Lowe adds.
“As Mail+ subscribers are highly engaged Mail readers, they are most likely to interact with advertising. Our aim is to end up with the best of both worlds.”
Mail+’s content strategy is driven by what appeals to the Mail’s broad readership rather than any specific sub-set and getting those readers engaged with content by maximising frequency and breadth.
“We want to encourage people to read across multiple different content areas,” he continues.
“The Mail newsroom has been creating content readers love for a long time and instinctively knows what people want. To this, we add an extra data layer that’s from understanding whether content is what subscribers will pay to engage with.”
Generally, if something works in one geographic market it will work elsewhere. But there are obvious differences when it comes to which personalities, celebrities or sports are most popular.
“Often, we try a content strand that works well in one geo in another and, if it works, adjust accordingly,” Lowe adds.
Subs marketing
The same applies to subscriber marketing.
“We focus heavily on organic marketing and conversion rate optimisation. And with search engine optimisation, Facebook posts, Reddit posts and so on, a MailOnline team focuses on each individually, obsessively,” he explains.
“So far, however, we’ve done little paid-for marketing beyond a little bit in Google and on Facebook.”
Understanding the value (or otherwise) of additional new features to combat subscriber drop-off has been important — and one of a number of important lessons learned since Mail+ was rolled out.
“Before we launched, we discussed whether we should do loyalty schemes but decided only to go down this route if we could prove they are the right things for our users and our business,” Lowe continues.
“A big loyalty programme can be relatively expensive to run. Often, no-one is quite sure whether or not they are the right thing to do because they’re almost a legacy feature. We found how much someone is reading your content accounts for around 90% of any drop off.
“Whatever nice extra you offer, engagement with content is key.”
Key lessons
This points to what Lowe believes are the two most important lessons anyone should take from Mail+’s launch, roll out and subsequent development so far.
Focus on content, is the first.
“There’s always a temptation to add a lot of extra stuff to improve a proposition, but we were quite clear that the success of Mail+ would live or die on the quality of our content,” he says.
“That means making sure that you’re not distracting users and importantly, you’re not distracting internal employees from the content.”
Commit properly, is the second.
“When we decided to do Mail+, we were given the complete support and trust of the chairman and our editors to go away and build something that will set us up for the next ten, 20, 30 years. It wasn’t ‘get your toes in the water and see how it goes’,” Lowe adds.
“That doesn’t mean spend an absolute fortune and hire a big team. But it does mean, be confident in what you’re doing and commit to doing that properly rather than half-assing it!”
Looking ahead, continual product development and the development of new next generation digital products will be an important focus at the Mail under Chief Product Officer Lewis Buttress, who recently joined from The Times and Sunday Times.
For Mail+, meanwhile, an important aim is to not stand still.
“We’ve got editors, we’ve got a team that’s responsible for acquiring subscribers, we’ve got a team that’s responsible for keeping subscribers and within each of those teams are a data analyst, a technology person, a product person, a marketing person,” says Lowe.
“Now Mail+ is fully launched into the geographies where we want it to be, the focus switches to letting those teams loose on the entire experience and continually innovating.”
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
