Extra.ie, The Daily Mail Offshoot In Ireland No One Has Heard Of

It’s been a year since the flashy Buzzfeed-style website, Extra.ie, was launched on the internet market in Ireland by DMG Media, formerly the Associated Newspapers, and the parent company of the odious right-wing Daily Mail newspaper in the United Kingdom. So far, it remains a fairly low-key publication, with relatively little known about its staff or editorial team. It’s based in the same Ballsbridge office address as its sister site, the celebrity-obsessed Evoke.ie, and the “Irish edition” of the UK Daily Mail, so presumably it is sharing some of the same resources.

Though DMG Media makes big claims for Extra.ie, boasting of 46,000 unique users (UU) or individual visitors per day, its domestic impact has been negligible. The website’s Twitter account has only 500 followers, though there is a more respectable 41,000 subscribers on Facebook (which may well indicate which way its demographic leans). By contrast, its near competitor, TheJournal.ie has a stated UU rate of 370,000 a day, racking up an astonishing 572,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 400,000 subscribers on Facebook (though this latter figure is beat by the 484,654 people who apparently enjoy the right-wing libertarian screeds of TheLiberal.ie).

The relative lack of popularity for the DMG Media publication might be explained by its fairly tone-deaf articles. Take this recent bizarrely worded feature:

Irish accent officially voted the sexiest across the British Isles

Well, we can’t say we’re surprised — but the Irish accent has officially been voted the sexiest on the British Isles.

Given that the vast majority of Irish people use the geo-political term “British Isles” to mean the island of Britain and its immediate offshore islands – which does not include this one – there is no surprise that the website has failed to strike much of a cord with online readers in Ireland. Indeed, asking around several tech-savvy friends all were surprised to find out that Extra.ie even existed. As one pointed out, its like a bastard mix of the twinned sites Joe.ie and Her.ie made worse by putting a Daily Mail veneer over it.

Note: If you’re interested in tracking down facts and figures about the state of Irish internet publications, the index at Media Live is a great place to start.