Friday 27 August 2010

It was nice while it lasted...

The rise of the internet, for a while, looked to herald a bight future free from the staggeringly malign influence of every idiot's favorite paper, the Daily Mail.

Alas, as the dribbling fools that constitute its core readership base finally learned to master a keyboard, things have now started to change, and the paper is now consolidating its lead as the most-read online UK newspaper.

However, that was until I discovered a previously unreleased piece of research* that analysed its online readership and concluded that vast numbers of its readers don't in fact read the mindless drivel that passes for current affairs in the paper. In fact, the following percentages of people over the past year visited for these reasons:

  • 78% of visitors clicked on the pictures of bikini-clad women on the right-hand side of the page, at the same time as shaking their head in disgust at the moral decay of modern society;

  • 56% of visitors typed "hilariously offensive/predictable Mail stories about asylum seekers/biscuits that give you cancer" into Google and subsequently emailed said stories to their latte drinking, Guardian-reading metropolitan friends, so that they could all chortle about it over a glass of prosecco in the evening after work and talk about how wonderful Ben Goldacre is;

  • 22% of visitors wanted to find out which object / foodstuff / leisure activity was likely to give you a major disease and/or cure cancer that day;

  • 11% of (men) wanted to cut-and-paste a Mail story about women's true place in society (i.e. "Helen was a high-flying city lawyer on £11,000,000,000 per second, but then realised she was actually 750% happier behind the sink in the kitchen") with the specific intention of annoying their (non-Mail reading) girlfriend, who then angrily repeated said Mail story to the blank, expressionless faces of her female friends, 75% of whom do read the Mail and don't get what all the fuss is about, partly because they ignore all of the political stories and instead stare at the pictures of cellulite on celebrity x, age-lines on celebrity y or zit on celebrity z.
*I would post a link to this research, but I can't as I've just made it up.

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