Having watched the rise of Britain's Mail Online over the last year, tongues are wagging that, in 2011, it could overtake The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as the world's most-visited newspaper website. Global users to Mail Online may have grown by 14.5 percent in the last six months, but NYTimes.com was no slouch either; it also found 11.4 percent more users, according to comScore. Mail Online (32.7 million users) still sits way behind NYTimes.com (50.5 million).
The thing that could change all that is NYTimes.com' introduction of a metered paid model in the New Year, which will likely reduce that site's traffic by some degree, perhaps to below that of the Mail. The Mail is hiring U.S. staff for an expansion there to embrace the opportunity it has found itself with.