What are the best ‘first’ loyalty credit cards to get?

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• mark2 says:

  9 Nov9 November 12:19

  It is ironic that the people who claim to be liberal are making such illiberal comments.

  • Dennis says:

    9 Nov9 November 13:49

    +1!!!!!

• Nick says:

  9 Nov9 November 12:45

  OT – Been looking at the QR deals out of CAI to BKK. Spied a deal next march out of all 4 sectors 3 were in First class, either the 777 (yes i know its intra ME), but F in the A380 DOH to BKK. £626 plus positioning cost seemed a steal plus the avios and TP. Anyone else been looking at this?

  • Rob says:

    9 Nov9 November 13:02

    Deal is correct, Qatar has yet to reprice following the collapse of the E£ last week.

• the real harry says:

  9 Nov9 November 13:02

  little known fact that Daily Mail is the most visited newspaper website in the world (I know you won’t believe me but it was discussed recently on Radio 4’s The Media Show)

  it’s extremely big in USA, Aus, NZ

  apparently the ‘sidebar of shame’ (ie the gossipy tidbit rubbish) is the main attraction – not the real current affairs news coverage

  • the real harry says:

    9 Nov9 November 13:44

    MailOnline and the next page for the ‘sidebar of shame’

    Martin Clarke has made the website into a traffic magnet but can it keep up with cash-rich rivals?
    Martin Clarke does not want his photograph taken. The man who publishes dozens of revealing celebrity pictures a day on MailOnline says he is too tired, having been up since 3am editing the website’s coverage of the Scottish referendum. “Not today, mate,” he says. Perhaps seeing the irony, he relents. “Quick, do it then.”

    Mr Clarke, an old-school newspaper man, has created one of the world’s digital news success stories. He took the Daily Mail – a title so traditional that its editor is said to have his emails printed out before reading them – and spun off a news and entertainment site that now attracts 11m users a day.

    MailOnline’s revenues are on track to grow by nearly half to £60m this financial year. It is expanding its US operations under the leadership of the man who is sitting beside the ballot-fatigued Mr Clarke today: BuzzFeed’s former second-in-command Jon Steinberg.

    Mr Clarke suggests the website can aspire to be “as profitable as the newspaper”, which brings in between £70m and £80m in operating profit a year.

    “There are going to end up being four or five big global news brands,” the MailOnline publisher says, naming Yahoo, CNN, the BBC and The New York Times. “We need to be one of them, we’re going to be one of them.”

    MailOnline, part of the London-listed company Daily Mail and General Trust, is currently the world’s most popular English-language newspaper website (three Chinese publications rank higher). When other news sources such as Yahoo are included, it ranks number two in the UK, number seven in the US, and number five in Australia.

    Its long headlines hook readers on stories; the page layout keeps them reading; and the “sidebar of shame” – as a box of celebrity misdemeanours is known – means the next guilty pleasure is never far away. If you are tired of MailOnline, you are tired of Kim Kardashian’s life – and most readers are not.

    But there are sceptics: MailOnline’s biggest source of revenue is selling banner advertisements, which Mr Steinberg himself once described as “a terrible advertising product”.

    It faces well-funded competitors such as BuzzFeed and Vice News, which are more adept at lucrative sponsored content, known as “native advertising”. And then there is the cost base: to produce its daily mix of more than 750 articles, MailOnline employs 615 people, including 406 editorial staff. That is the case even though many stories are taken from news wire services, or repackaged from other newspapers.

    “It remains unprofitable today and it seems that every increase in revenue is ac­companied by a further increase in cost,” Mike Darcey, chief executive of its rival News UK, owner of The Sun and The Times, said this year. “Does this ever resolve itself, do revenues ever outstrip costs? Personally I have my doubts.”

    Mr Clarke, not known for having a thick skin, calls that assessment “utterly wrong”. Unlike print products, MailOnline’s distribution costs barely rise as its readership grows, he argues.
    “Why don’t you ring Mr Darcey and ask him how much longer The Sun paywall is going to be up? And when he brings it down, would you ask him to give me a call because there are a couple of bones I’d like to pick with him? I’m not like Darcey, I don’t spend my time telling other people how to run their businesses.”

    A spokesman for Mr Darcey said giving away The Sun’s content would make “no business sense”.

    MailOnline has cost its parent group about £35m to date. Without continuing investments in the US, Australia and soon elsewhere, it would be profitable, Mr Clarke says. “But we don’t want to be a bit profitable in Britain, we want to be very profitable globally.”

    At present the hype surrounds news sites aimed at those born in the 1980s and 1990s, known as “millennials”. Buzz­Feed was valued at $850m by an investment from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; in contrast equity analysts value DMGT’s media division, which includes the Daily Mail print titles and MailOnline, at about £1bn.

    Can the UK site match BuzzFeed’s new $50m war chest? “We’re not investing anything like that,” says Mr Clarke. “That would probably be more than we really need. We’ve got good plans for video, but I don’t want to set up a film studio … You can only do what you’re good at. We’re good at news.”

    He wants MailOnline to focus on global stories such as “Isis, Gaza, Ebola, the Malaysian jets”. Television does foreign news “in pretty much the same way”, he adds. “Even relying on agency copy and stringers, we can own those stories.” So MailOnline is investing in more journalists to deepen its coverage.

    Mr Steinberg, meanwhile, is charged with increasing MailOnline’s work with brands. MailOnline is hoping brands will pay £65,000 per sponsored article in the UK, with a guarantee of 450,000 page views. Some of these pieces will sit in new boxes on the left-hand side of the page.

    The native advertising will be clearly labelled. However, unlike at BuzzFeed, the same journalists who write editorial content also write sponsored articles, creating potential conflicts of interest.
    Since joining MailOnline three months ago, Mr Steinberg has become a partial convert to banner ads. “I’d say my view on high-impact homepage takeovers has certainly changed,” he says, referring to advertisers’ ability to place advertising on the site’s background.

    In the US MailOnline is branding itself “Daily Mail”, and recently paid more than £1m to buy the web domain dailymail.com from a newspaper in Charleston, West Virginia. Mr Steinberg is keen to play on the newspaper’s heritage. “It feels like Burberry,” he says. “There’s an aspect of the brand that is aspirational.”

    Not everyone would agree. The actor George Clooney called it “the worst kind of tabloid” after an inaccurate story about his fiancée’s family.

    “We made a big error,” says Mr Clarke. But he goes on: “Our best readers are celebrities. They love the pictures of themselves. I’m not hobnobbing with celebrities everyday, but when I do run into people like the Kardashians, they adore what we do.”

    MailOnline is keen not to become dependent on social media for its articles to reach readers. A tweak to Facebook’s algorithms caused its traffic to surge in January and then fall back. “I don’t want to be somebody who’s just providing free content for Facebook,” says Mr Clarke.

    About 40 per cent of MailOnline’s traffic comes from readers who access it via the homepage or its mobile apps. That is a reflection on Mr Clarke himself, who spends hours each day ranking stories, writing headlines and picking photos. Does he ever look at the site and think it is just perfect? “Never,” he says.

    One former employee has lambasted life at MailOnline as a “battery hen operation”. But Mr Clarke seems to enjoy its demands. As Mr Steinberg says: “The minute you walk out of here, he’s going to rip the homepage up.”

  • Alan says:

    9 Nov9 November 14:30

    Indeed – lots of friends from Oz read it and couldn’t understand why I was supporting the petition against BA providing it – they had only see the trashy content and hadn’t realised how horrendous the main content is!

• PM says:

  9 Nov9 November 13:07

  If there was any doubt about the clear lack of knowledge and intelligence from DM readers, take a look at the comments. So many wannabe experts who have no idea whatsoever.

  I for example, by playing the game cleverly have accumulated about 200k avios (used quite a few as well in the meantime) in a year without having a phenomenal salary or spending extra amounts. (probably more than the average DM reader though)

  So even if you try to enlighten the DM readership they are still just as dumb as the journalists feeding them.

  • Anon says:

    9 Nov9 November 13:20

    Aye, the comments section is hilarious, huge level of ignorance and cognitive dissonance.

    Let them think its a lie, a joke, a scam, too much hassle, I’m sure we’re more than happy for them not to turn left, we need some reward availability for the rest of us..

    • bryan says:

      9 Nov9 November 15:29

      My favourite comment. “Can’t use points on Ryanair though…”

  • Grimz says:

    9 Nov9 November 13:34

    +1 with a household salary of around 45k a year!

• Paul L says:

  9 Nov9 November 14:02

  50% redemption sale/last minute section on BA? Does this happen often at BA?

  • James says:

    9 Nov9 November 14:18

    no

• Alistair Todd says:

  9 Nov9 November 15:27

  Slightly OT but relating to the HHonors Platinum Visa…

  It offers “2,500 Bonus Points for each of your first four stays at any Hilton Worldwide hotel in your first 12 months of card membership”. I’ve stayed 3 times since getting my card and have not received any bonus points. I’ve asked HHonors customer service about this and they say “sorry for the confusion, please add your visa card number to your HHonors account”.

  I don’t know what that means. They seem to be talking about adding it as a payment card, but I didn’t see anything in the Ts&Cs to say that you have to pay for your stays with the Visa card in order to get those 2500 bonus points.

  Anyone have any experience with this?

  • Alan says:

    9 Nov9 November 15:38

    Yes I’ve had the card multiple times and this is always an issue. Normally they manually credit the points for you but their automated system does seem to have difficulty tracking the stays if you don’t have the Visa card in your HHonors profile. Of course if you get them manually credited then add the card to your profile you may receive them again 😉

    • Alistair Todd says:

      9 Nov9 November 16:13

      Ah OK. Good to know. Thanks!

• Pol says:

  9 Nov9 November 15:47

  My favourite comment is this one:

  Yep Davina – a con – like so many other things….. local council sent TWO staff members to homes [at what cost?] to entice residents to sign up to have their bin inspected from time to time – so they could win some mad prize money!!! but actually to be penalised / fined when the *wrong stuff* is found in their bins – can’t complain as they signed up to it !!!

  • Alan says:

    9 Nov9 November 15:52

    Haha I love it – it puts our OT comments here totally to shame 😀

    • Graeme says:

      9 Nov9 November 16:00

      The world is full of idiots…

• Vas says:

  9 Nov9 November 16:57

  Quick question on Amex Gold if I may. If I was to indeed take your advice and cancel and then re-apply after 6 months, what happens to the Reward points already accumulated?

  • Alan says:

    9 Nov9 November 17:00

    You need to move them somewhere else or you’ll lose them! I believe you get a one month grace period although I’d just move them before cancelling myself.

    • Vas says:

      9 Nov9 November 17:02

      Many thanks for clarifying.

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