Suddenly, DailyMail.co.uk isn’t getting too excited about its impressive overseas showing in its debut monthly ABCe returns. Amongst July unique user figures of 11.8 million that catapulted it to second place amongst U.K. online newspapers, DailyMail.co.uk reported 78 percent of users coming from outside of Britain (even higher than Guardian Unlimited’s proportion).

SEE ALSO: Daily Mail Becomes UK’s No. 2 Newspaper Site After 162 Percent Annual User Growth

—Editorial director Martin Clark, in The Observer: “Advertisers at the moment are most concerned with UK traffic. Its great to have international visitors and its great the internet’s such an international phenomenon, but in economic terms you can’t [convert] it into revenue. It’s pointless everyone judging themselves by traffic that no one can quite work out how to monetise.” And on Journalism.co.uk: “All our efforts are focused on the UK traffic, we judge ourselves on that growth because they are the people our advertisers, at the moment, are interested in. No British newspaper website - and we all have masses of traffic from abroad particularly the States - has really figured out how you effectively monetise it.”

—Guardian Unlimited, of course, reckons it can monetise the 63 percent of its 16 million users that come from overseas - it is due to launch GuardianAmerica.com soon, just one of the British publishers to target the U.S. This is a much more sobre, but unchanged, outlook from DailyMail.co.uk. Back in 2004, when just 11 percent of the site’s readers were not in Britain, Clarke’s predecessor Avril Williams reckoned even that to be “too much” and “would far rather they had a hundred per cent UK audience”, echoing Clarke that “you are just paying an awful lot of bandwidth and an awful lot of server costs to serve those people”, according to a study on the topic from London’s City University. Now that the site’s overseas following has ballooned, it is looking more like an opportunity, not a drain.

- Telegraph.co.uk: Edward Roussel, Telegraph.co.uk digital editor, gave The Observer his response to DailyMail.co.uk’s impressive showing, seeing The Drudge Report as a key traffic driver: “We counted 36 Daily Mail stories on Drudge during July. It’s testament to the power of Drudge. They write stories with global appeal - terror stories and showbiz stories in particular.” As reported, City University’s July study found pretty much all the UK news sites get a significant amount of traffic from Drudge, with the aggregator giving them 25 percent of their visits overall.