How to Read the Daily Mail Without Ads, Pop-ups or Autoplay Video
The Daily Mail has no paywall, but its pages are among the heaviest on the web. Here is how to read any Mail Online story as clean text with no ads, video or sidebar.
Paywall behaviour last tested
The Daily Mail is the exception on this site. Mail Online has no paywall and never has; its business model is reach and advertising, and it is one of the most visited news sites in the world. The problem is the other side of that model. A typical Mail Online article page weighs several megabytes, carries dozens of ad slots, autoplaying video, a sticky share bar and the famous sidebar of celebrity stories. On a phone, on mobile data, it is slow and hard to read. This guide is about reading the Mail as plain text.
Why Mail Online pages are so heavy
Mail Online pages contain far more than the article. In our own testing the HTML of a single story ran to more than two megabytes before any images or scripts loaded, which is why the reader caps how much of a page it downloads. Most of that weight is advertising code, tracking scripts, related-story modules and the sidebar. The article itself is a few kilobytes of text.
Read a Mail Online story as clean text
- Copy the article link. Mail links look like dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12345678/headline-slug.html. The dailymail.com domain used in the Mail's own feeds works too.
- Paste it into the box on the Skip the Paywall home page and press Read Article.
- The story appears in a clean reader view: headline, byline, the article body and its inline photographs, nothing else.
In our latest test, an 820-word Mail health story loaded in under a second with all 28 paragraphs and none of the surrounding page. It is the difference between reading and wading.
What is stripped out
- Every ad slot, including the sticky ones
- Autoplaying video players and the video sidebar
- The right-hand "Femail Today" column
- Newsletter pop-ups, cookie banners and share bars
- Comment threads
Inline photographs and their captions stay, because they are part of the article.
Reader mode versus a server-side reader
Safari, Firefox and Edge all have a built-in reader mode, and on the Daily Mail it works reasonably well once the page has loaded. The catch is "once the page has loaded": your browser still downloads the full page, ads and all, before reader mode can reformat it. A server-side reader fetches the page for you, keeps the text and sends only that, which is why it is faster on a slow connection.
Other British papers with no paywall
The Guardian, the BBC, Sky News, the Mirror, the Sun and Metro are all free. The reader works as a clean-text view on each of them for the same reasons. For the British papers that do charge, see our guides to The Times, The Independent and The i Paper.
A note on the Mail's business model
The Mail's advertising is what pays its journalists, and reading through a text-only view means those ads are not shown. If you read the Mail every day, its own Mail+ subscription offers an ad-light experience and supports the paper directly.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from Daily Mail and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Daily Mail have a paywall?
No. Mail Online is free to read and always has been. The Mail+ subscription adds the digital edition of the print paper and an ad-light experience, but the website itself is not paywalled.
Why are Daily Mail pages so slow on my phone?
A Mail Online article page contains several megabytes of advertising, tracking and video code around a small amount of text. A reader that extracts only the article avoids downloading the rest.
Do the photos still show in the reader?
Yes. Inline photographs and captions that are part of the article are kept. Advertising images, video players and sidebar thumbnails are removed.