We reported last month that, by some counts, the Daily Mail had succeeded in its improbable quest — it's not even the biggest newspaper in Britain – to become the biggest newspaper on the Internet.
Its approach, aggressively middlebrow and focused on traditional "human interest stories," gave it more dramatic gains in January, bringing it to 51.7 million unique visitors in January, to 48 million from the second-place New York Times.
The Times, of course, does this despite a paywall, no mean feat, but a Times spokeswoman quibbled with last month's numbers on the grounds that they include a personal finance site run out of the Mail's newsroom, but not Times sister sites like the Boston Globe. The new numbers mean that even without that finance site, the Mail is on top, though Huffington Post remains the largest news (not newspaper) site on the Web.
The Times's move to dispute the numbers last month, however, rubbed MailOnline chief Martin Clarke the wrong way, and he expressed some satisfaction at the widening gap: The new numbers "I trust will stop their whining (a bit)," he said in an email.