Yesterday was an interesting day for the Daily Mail.
Backgrounder: The Daily Mail is a British Tabloid newspaper that has made the segway online to now occupy the charts as the “worlds most visited newspaper site”. I often end up talking to product managers about this site and we marvel at the simplicity of the web-product, and therein lies the genius. However. It has really struggled with monetization.
Now it is experimenting with ecommerce.
Everyday the Daily Mail carries numerous photo stories of “papped celebrities”: most of them set up by their PRs. What was notable about yesterday is that numerous stories had celebrities planted photographed carrying or wearing items of immediately purchasable apparel. The Daily Mail now goes the extra step of carrying a buy-it-now "Femail Fashion Finder" element on the page. If you're interested they are here, here and here.
From a web product perspective, this is wonderfully joined up bit of product placement, PR, advertising and native advertising. And it will be interesting to see if folks are now turned off given the explicit nature of the spiv.
What’s more interesting for me is that this is another data-point that proves the investment thesis that underlay our investment into FarFetch. That business just keeps on growing.
And it shows how media has finally caught up: Asos realised 5 years ago that magazines and retail had to merge. Only now are the Daily Mail getting to it.
But beware.
As media companies get “closer to the transaction”, the closer they will get to performance based advertising. They will then be choosing between the eCPM of their ecommerce lead gen to the CPM from their rate card. I can guess which will be higher.
It will be interesting to see how long this experiment lasts…
