The Mail still plays in the big-numbers league. But inside the newsroom, the dials are quietly being reset. Page views, once the dominant metric on every dashboard, are being pushed aside in favor of time spent, repeat visits and what Mail executives call a “golden metric” of quality engagement.
The urgency behind that reset is the rise of zero-click search and AI assistants, which answer user queries on their own surfaces and send fewer people to publisher sites. The goal is to rebalance a business built on high reach into one where loyalty, habit and subscription revenue carry much more of the load, according to Lewis Buttress, chief product and innovation officer of Mail owner DMG Media.
That rethink underpins a wider product overhaul: games upgraded from sideshow to front door, new hubs centered around coverage areas, designed to keep niche communities coming back, an AI-powered dynamic paywall tuned to user behavior; a bigger bet on personalization and the app as a primary destination. Even the upcoming migration from a co.uk. to a .com domain, and the buildout of an internal AI stack, are in service of the same idea — turn fly-by traffic into repeat usage the Mail can own and control.
From page views to propensity: AI-powered dynamic paywall
Like most publishers, the Mail has seen referral traffic declines, with its execs vocal about the drops and how they were mitigating them. Aggregate Daily Mail traffic in March 2026 was approximately 218 million monthly visitors, according to digital market intelligence company Similarweb data, down 17% year over year, and down 37% from the 348 million visitors it generated in March 2023.
But executives say roughly 60% of that traffic is now direct, giving the publisher enough loyal, repeat users to optimize for depth and propensity rather than one-off reach.
When Buttress joined last January, the Mail’s editorial KPIs were blunter. “Every dashboard in the newsroom was page views,” he said. “That made sense in the scale era, but it’s less useful when your business goal shifts from driving raw traffic to converting and retaining paying readers.”
Over the past year, the publisher has been phasing in a new stack of metrics: time spent on page, repeat usage over a seven-day window, and an in-house “golden” metric that blends traffic and dwell time with deeper engagement like sharing, commenting, and saving. The aim is to distinguish genuinely valuable journalism from low-quality volume, he noted.
The Mail has also been quietly testing an AI-powered dynamic paywall to 50% of its global audience over the last three months. Rather than hard-paywalling a fixed set of stories, the system weighs a combination of user propensity (how often someone visits, what they do on site, how recently they were last active) and content propensity (topic, section, time of day), to decide what to put behind the wall and when.
It isn’t yet tinkering with dynamic pricing; the focus now is on maximizing the impact of each paywall impression and learning what people will actually pay for. Early signals look different in market, he noted. In the U.K., female lifestyle and service journalism consistently over-performs for subscriptions, while in the U.S. it’s high-impact scoops that drive the biggest spikes. For example, a story relating to the former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem generated 2 million page views globally, with 1.6 million in the U.S., and has driven over 1,000 paid subscriptions, per the publisher.
The Mail isn’t treating the paywall purely as a yield lever. It’s also an editorial feedback loop. “We went from a no subscription business to a subscription business [and are] using it to supplement some of the editorial decisions around what’s worth, what’s a subscription piece versus what’s a free piece,” he said. “It’s been a nice, like training tool for us to understand the content a bit more.”
That focus has sharpened since last year, when the publisher set an aggressive goal for Mail+ to reach one million subscribers by 2028, turning subscription growth from a side quest into the core commercial narrative. Currently Mail+ has 350,000 paying subscribers.
Monetization, migration and the AI plumbing behind it
Rewiring the dashboards and the paywall is only one part of the job; the Mail is also reshaping the ad model, domain strategy and AI stack that sit underneath it.
On advertising, it plans to cut its current 10 ad slots per page to three, trading cluttered pages and low-intent impressions for fewer, higher-value placements. “Rather than have lots of ads on the page, it allows us to have better opportunities to sell those kinds of high-value touch points to advertisers,” he said.
Meanwhile, the publisher is preparing to move from a co.uk to a .com domain so that, as Buttress put it, a global operation with newsrooms in the U.S. and Australia stops being treated in ad systems as a U.K. website.
“If you did that a few years ago, you would have risked losing a lot of Google traffic. But now, because we’ve got this baseline of a really loyal, direct audience, we’re taking that leap to move everything to .com and it’s like the final establishment of a global news and entertainment business on one domain that we can now sell to advertisers and build a subscription business on.”
The AI work largely sits behind the scenes as plumbing for that strategy rather than as a consumer product in its own right. Mail IQ, an internal platform that wraps different models and is already stripping out CMS and social drudge work: an early tool that auto-generates article fields saves about 90 seconds per story, while a social-copy generator can cut up to 15 minutes per article, per the publisher. Together they free up roughly 22.5 hours a day — or 157 hours a week — across the newsroom, time that can be redirected into reporting and production.
Coupled with the Mail’s decision to block most AI crawlers rather than license its content to LLMs, the focus on games, apps and vertical hubs is as much about sovereignty as it is about engagement: if it’s not going to be aggregated and answered elsewhere, the experience on its own properties has to be rich enough to keep people returning.
To support that push, the Mail has built a team of four AI product engineers, who are embedded within the newsroom. Buttress plans to hire four more this year. He added that there is a quiet culture of vibe coding, with product and design teams using the same tools to spin up for example, quick playable prototypes and only hardening the games that resonate.
“We haven’t quite got to the point where people are vibing coding on our live platforms, but we’re definitely using that technology to build things that give us more confidence that when we do productionize it, we know it’s going to make an impact,” said Buttress. But he stressed that this won’t be replacing its vendor tech stack any time soon.
Games, verticals and community: building daily habit
Buttress joined the publisher in January 2025 with a remit to “reinvent the product from a high-reach business to one where users come back frequently and spend time,” as he put it. He oversees a team of around 90 people across product, innovation and development.
“The product didn’t really have a hub. It was built to be this thing that’s been incredibly successful, but didn’t necessarily have any flexibility to take in some of the new formats that we were producing as a newsroom. That, combined with where the industry is with zero-click and consumers moving to AI platforms, kind of closing up — we have a big opportunity,” he said.
Its 60% direct, loyal audience gives the product team a solid foundation for habit-building experiments like games and true-crime hubs, noted Buttress.
Over the last six months, The Mail tested roughly 30 games internally ahead of releasing its revamped games section, which includes its daily word game Trace, launched March 26. Roughly 10 of those are expected to make it into the live portfolio this year.
Some of that experimentation happens through “vibe coding” — using AI tools to spin up playable game prototypes in days, test them, and only productionize the winners.
“If you look at the latest app release that we put out, games are front and center, right in the middle of the navigation, just because we want it to be the first thing you do in the day, the last thing you do at night,” he said. “It’s the thing that people talk to peers about. It’s the thing that people talk to families about. ‘Did you do your Trace today?’”
Before the relaunch, games attracted almost no traffic. In the first week, they jumped to around 50,000 to 100,000 users, with more than half of those returning daily — all before the company had done any real marketing, per Buttress.
That habit-formation loop is being tied directly into a broader vertical strategy. The Mail has launched a Crime Desk hub, investing in an area where it already performs well in podcasts and long-form coverage. The idea is to bundle true-crime stories, audio and custom interactive formats into one destination. One prototype that made it into the mix is a daily crime game “loosely built on Cluedo and Sudoku.” It’s a good example of how the Mail wants its verticals and games to cross-pollinate: crime fans discover games through the hub; games players are nudged into richer crime coverage and podcasts.
Taken together, games, hubs like Crime Desk and more intentional community tooling (comments, Q&As with journalists) are the front line of the Mail’s loyalty strategy: a way to turn a one-off click into a daily habit that is much harder for zero-click search or social algorithms to dislodge.
As Enders Analysis recently argued, habit has become the north star for publishers. Light users haven’t vanished — they’ve simply stopped arriving at the front door, with “what happened” increasingly answered upstream by platforms and AI summaries. The homepage now primarily services the already-converted; breadth alone does not create defensibility. Durable value, the analysts wrote, depends on occupying a recurring need state through vertical products, distinctive voice and community, and reinforcing it through authority and belonging. The Mail’s strategy is essentially a live response to that diagnosis.
