Associated Northcliffe Digital

Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) was the digital consumer division of Daily Mail and General Trust which operated the digital assets of Associated Newspapers and Northcliffe Newspapers Group from its formation in 2006 until it was announced that the division was to be folded back into Associated Newspapers on 9 July 2010.

AND was formed in mid-2006 from Associated New Media, Associated New Ventures and Northcliffe Electronic Publishing. It published websites including jobsite, motors.co.uk, the Digital property group including FindaProperty & Primelocation, online dating aggregator Allegran (sold March 2010 ), Teletext Ltd, Mail Online for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers, Loot, and a variety of digital publications including This is Money, for Financial Mail on Sunday, business and financial news, and This is London. AND's digital travel businesses included Teletext Holidays, This is Travel, and Villarenters.com. In April 2009, Richard D. Titus was named as CEO and his departure was announced in July 2010 when the division was folded back into Associated Newspapers.

Projects and successes

On 1 July 2009, AND launched its hyperlocal project, LocalPeople. The pilot project across an initial 50 websites is led by AND and sees the creation of a series of community sites targeted at small towns and neighbourhoods. Each site offers a wealth of local information, such as news and local classifieds, but also allows local groups to be formed by residents who participate in discussion forums, publish their own stories and connect with people nearby.

Shortly after its formation in 2006, AND won the AOP's Online Publisher of the Year award. According to the Daily Mail and General Trust's preliminary annual results on 23 November 2006, AND generates annualized revenues of £90 million with a profit margin of approximately 20%. A comprehensive review of AND's strategy was presented to Lehman Brothers on 12 July 2006 and can be seen here(pdf).

In May 2007, AND's new product development division launched Lasting Tribute, an online memorials website which includes all the death and in memoriam notices published in its sister regional newspapers. Later that year, a series of white-label Lasting Tribute portals were rolled out enabling every Northcliffe-owned newspaper website to have its own version of the site. In October 2008, Lasting Tribute won the Gold awards for Digital Innovation and Niche Website of the Year at the Newspaper Society Advertising and Digital Media Awards. The AND team that devised, designed and created Lasting Tribute was named as Digital Team of the Year at the same event In the same month, Lasting Tribute also scooped two top accolades from the Data Publishers Association - Consumer Product Development of the Year and Consumer Outstanding Achievement Award.

External links

• AND website
• DMGT corporate site with a list of official websites.
• LocalPeople launched