Shares in the company that owns both The Daily Mail and MailOnline have plummeted by 25% after they announced a huge £112m loss.
The publications’ parent company DMGT made a profit of £202m in 2016, but said that ‘challenging conditions in some of our sectors’ had led to the huge losses incurred in 2017.
And, in a stark warning for the paper’s long term future, the company added that they expected 2018 to be just as tough.
DMGT stated that due to concerns over the direction the papers were taking, they had subsequently devised a ‘new strategic vision’ for its titles – which also include The Metro.
And in further news, that will surely delight supporters of campaign group Stop Funding Hate, DMGT also announced that sales of print advertising, one of The Daily Mail‘s primary sources of income, dropped by 5%.
Stop Funding Hate recently grabbed nationwide headlines after convincing stationary firm PaperChase to cease advertising in The Daily Mail.
The anti-hate activist group began their latest campaign following ‘a torrid few weeks of divisive stories about trans people’ in the newspaper.
After a torrid few weeks of divisive stories about trans people, is a Daily Mail promotion really what customers want to see @FromPaperchase? #StartSpreadingLove #StopFundingHate https://t.co/T1psWVEFpk pic.twitter.com/BI5Vf0KTgd
— Stop Funding Hate (@StopFundingHate) November 18, 2017
PaperChase finally responded to the criticism of their advertising choices by tweeting:
We’ve listened to you about this weekend’s newspaper promotion. We now know we were wrong to do this – we’re truly sorry and we won’t ever do it again. Thanks for telling us what you really think and we apologise if we have let you down on this one. Lesson learnt.
Whilst online advertising rose 18% in the same period, the company added that they expected media revenues to decline in the mid-single digits in 2018.
The news of the Daily Mail’s financial troubles will also come as fantastic news to supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who has endured a torrid campaign of abuse from the far-right publication.
The Daily Mail subjected the Labour leader to an astonishing 14 pages of negative coverage on the day of the election, a barrage that Corbyn responded to in hilarious fashion during Labour’s jubilant Conference earlier this year.
In scenes that delighted Labour members and supporters, the Labour leader essentially told The Daily Mail to go f*ck itself:
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