According to a story in TheGuardian.com, whose parent company operates Mail Online otherwise known as the  Daily Mail & General Trust “has paid potentially as much as £1m-plus to secure the valuable domain name. DailyMail.com”

One Million British Pounds Equal just over $1.650,000.

According to the story “Mail Online is switching from a .co.uk to .com homepage address, following protracted negotiations with the US paper that owned the dailymail.com domain name”.

The technically challenging domain shift will see the 161 million monthly unique browsers who visit Dailymail.co.uk instead land on dailymail.com.

Parent company Daily Mail & General Trust is understood to have been pursuing the dailymail.com domain name for some time.

It has been owned by US newspaper the Charleston Daily Mail, part of John Paton’s Digital First Media group, since 1996.

In early December Brad McElhinny, editor and publisher of the Charleston Daily Mail wrote a piece explaining a shift to www.charlestondailymail.com.

“At some point I’d expect that visitors to www.dailymail.com will receive news from the British tabloid, the Daily Mail, instead of from Charleston, West Virginia,” he said.

DMGT also controls thedailymail.com, but this already re-routes to the existing dailymail.co.uk website.

The technical move from the existing .co.uk to a .com domain is likely to have a temporarily negative impact on traffic to the website.

Guardian News & Media made a similar move to a global web presence, theguardian.com, last July. Web traffic declined slightly in the following months, before recovering.

Over the same period Mail Online experienced 33% growth (from 120 million to 161 million), Independent.co.uk surged 28% (from 23.5 million to 30 million) and Telegraph.co.uk rose 13% from 54 million to 61 million.””