Deep Dive stories – Mail Online’s strategy to generate more engagement

Deep Dive, or when scrolling meets data, is a format that's become increasingly popular in recent years. Mail Online launched this immersive narrative format in 2024, divided into chapters, enhanced with data visualisation, and designed to capture attention.

Since then, they have created about 30 Deep Dives stories published every 2 weeks. One of them is “What would REALLY happen if Russia nuked Britain and the US?” That’s a world war scenario story, with interactive maps, missile trajectories, and a choice of narrative paths depending on your nationality.

Deep Dive stories are not yet intended as a revenue-driving part of Mail Online, as there are no ads and paywalls on the pages.

One of the goals is rather to create powerful stories that don't rely on social media to engage. And the results are very good, with an average of 100,000 views – compared to normally 20,000 to 30,000 for a news article by Mail Online – and a dwell time of two minutes to eight minutes.

The Fix spoke with Harry Lewis-Irlam, director of visual storytelling.

How did the idea come about?

Deep Dive as a concept began as an idea two years ago, when some of the head bosses here at the Daily Mail had a conference with other newspapers. They could see how much effort people were putting into these sorts of long-form interactive articles, these deep storytelling mediums. And it was something that the Daily Mail had never done before.

So as an effort to produce their own, they hired me, and I've been here about a year and a half. I first completely revamped the way that we do online graphics in general. Before all of our graphics were JPEGs in articles, there were no interactives, and there were no responsive graphics or animations.

And then, we started to think about how we can create full visual stories that use this technology. In one year and a half, we've done about 30 Deep Dive stories, one every two weeks.

How do you choose a topic, and what is the production process like?

Each article is normally a core of three people. We have a very small team. The entire design and web development is all done by me. And then we tend to have one person who writes the story and one person who edits it.

So there is a lot of back and forth: how can we make this better, how can we make the narrative flow better, I want to do this kind of thing with it, can you write the story around that?

Sometimes it's very much design-led, sometimes it's content-led. We can also get more people to do picture research or video research as well, so there's a scope for us to work with other departments as well.

How long does it take to produce a story, and how do you choose the topics?

The actual design and development of the story only takes a few days normally. I've done some stories in a day, others are a bit longer, depending on the length of the story or if we need, for example, legal loopholes to make sure that we were saying the right things and weren't open to lawsuits.

For the topics, quite a lot of our content is based around anniversaries, like 5 years since this or 10 years since that, that's obviously a good springboard for a lot of this content. But we also do quite a bit of reactive stuff as well, like the situation in Israel or Ukraine, or more recently with the downfall of P. Diddy.

What are the results? Do you see an increase in engagement?

It’s going very well. On average, all of our Deep Dive articles now get over 100,000 views, which is great for us, because our standard article is probably anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000. So it's doing better than average in terms of the view count.

The dwell time is also incredibly high. Here at the Daily Mail, we expect an article to get around 45 seconds of dwell time, but these articles are now getting anywhere between two minutes and eight minutes, depending on the subject matter. So people are sticking around and reading them more.

It’s always really hard to predict how well they're going to do sometimes, because some of these really long ones, they don't do as well as you'd expect them to do. But some of the shorter ones, like one we did on the Titan sub a couple of weeks back, did have lots of views, but it was quite a short article. So it really just depends.

Do you think that this type of highly visual content also attracts a younger audience?

If we check our app, we have many comments, and we find that the people who are commenting are certainly of the younger generation because they understand interactive content maybe a little bit better and are more naturally drawn to that content as well.

They might not want to dedicate 20 minutes to reading a story, but we can maybe digest our stories in a different way and reduce them down to a much quicker format.\

The audience of the Daily Mail website probably skews to around the 50-years-old mark, so this is a market we can tap into for young people. There are other projects in the works that I can't go much more into that are aimed at targeting younger audiences as well.

What is the most popular story so far?

In terms of the most views and the longest dwell, it’s an article we did about what would happen if Russia tried to start a nuclear war.

That was our longest one, because it's about four different chapters. It was in the prime spot on the page for a whole day. So that one did about half a million views.

And for now, there is no advertisement and paywall?

Yes, it’s the way it's built at the moment. There's certainly scope in the future because this is a premium product that either we could start using with advertising or potentially use with paid subscribers, where we've got MailPlus. So we can use it to drive subscriptions to MailPlus as well.

If we also want to start exploring different concepts, we have to plunge more money and people into it because I'm one person. I've got my limits of what I can do on my own. So I think for the future we are going to try and keep scaling this up and get it into adverts or behind paywalls.

So you're planning to do more of these types of stories in the future?

Considering the response that we're getting from our audience, yes, absolutely. We're going to plan on producing not only more of these but also having a wider range of different types of content that we can create.

Not many tabloid newspapers do this kind of storytelling. The people that do it tend to be the more broadsheet papers. So it will be interesting to see over the next couple of years how many tabloid newspapers start to pick up this level of interactive storytelling. Because I think it's probably only going to grow as people try to engage their audience more.

Source of the cover photo: Nastya Dulhiier via Unsplash