Monday 13 December 2010

The Mail's secret love for Facebook

I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I say that the Daily Mail hates Facebook.

Over the past 18 months the Mail has blamed Facebook for murders, falsely claimed that Facebook provides a safe haven for paedophiles, alleged that Facebook is behind a massive nationwide crimewave, blamed Facebook for an outbreak of syphilis, said Facebook is responsible for rising insurance premiums, accused Facebook of causing riots at parties, and this being the Mail and the natural order of things needing to be maintained, said that Facebook gives you cancer.

So it took me a while to stop giggling when I read the following paragraph in Press Gazette's coverage of recent speech given by Martin Clarke, publisher on Mail Online:
"Emphasising the importance of social media for the marketing of news websites, Clarke said that 10 per cent of Mail Online's UK traffic now comes in via Facebook, making it the biggest source of traffic for the site after Google."

So remember boys and girls - social networking might give you an STD, turn you into a rioter and make you an easy target for kiddy-fiddlers, but you can't argue with its potential for driving traffic figures.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Daily fail, so bad it's funny, erm...

inbobvetrust said...

It's mainly because Facebook posts and articles like this drive so much traffic to their website.

How many links did you just promote?

P. Stable said...

Too many, I should add a health warning.

It would be interesting to know how many visitors they get from Facebook users saying "Oh my god! Have you seen what crazy shit the Mail's come out with this time?"