Mail Online (DailyMail.co.uk) buys DailyMail.com domain name for £1m-plus

The Guardian wrote an article today about Mail Online is switching from the domain name dailymail.co.uk to a .com domain name. After negotiations with the US paper “Charleston Daily Mail” that owned the dailymail.com domain name owner Daily Mail & General Trust is thought to have paid potentially as much as £1m-plus to buy the .com domain name.

DailyMail.com has been owned by Charleston Daily Mail, part of John Paton’s Digital First Media group, since 1996.

Charleston Daily Mail has made an announcement on the DailyMail.com informing it’s readers for their change from the sold domain name DailyMail.com to the new homepage of the newspaper at charlestondailymail.com:

“Dear Reader,

The Daily Mail has recently changed its website address to www.charlestondailymail.com. If you’re reading this message then you have arrived at The Charleston Daily Mail using our old website address. In a few moments, you will be automatically redirected to the Charleston Daily Mail news website where you can continue to read our news.”

DMGT also owns the domain name thedailymail.com, that currently redirects to the existing dailymail.co.uk website.

Guardian News & Media made a similar move to a .com domain name, theguardian.com, last July.

“The technically challenging domain shift will see the 161 million monthly unique browsers who visit Dailymail.co.uk instead land on dailymail.com.”

“The US market is hugely important for the Daily Mail as well as other international digital publishers and a .co.uk domain name just doesn’t cut it in ad sales over there,” said one source.