| The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market newspaper and online news source published in London in a tabloid format. Founded in 1896, it is the United Kingdom's highest-circulated daily newspaper. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, while Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively.
The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals.
In 1900 the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so (in 1899, the Daily Mail had organised special trains to bring the London-printed papers north). The same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers.
In 1906 the paper offered £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester, followed by a £1,000 prize for the first flight across the English Channel. 29 Punch magazine thought the idea preposterous and offered £10,000 for the first flight to Mars, but by 1910 both the Mail's prizes had been won. The paper continued to award prizes for aviation sporadically until 1930.
A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58, and it had the lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds among the major British dailies. Uniquely for a British daily newspaper, it has a majority female readership, with women making up 52–55% of its readers.
In February 2017, the Daily Mail became the first source to be deprecated as an "unreliable source" for use as a reference on the English Wikipedia. Between April 2019 and March 2020 it had an average daily readership of approximately 2.180 million, of whom approximately 1.407 million were in the ABC1 demographic and .773 million in the C2DE demographic.
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