Stronger demand for advertising on news and gossip website MailOnline helped owner DMGT report a better-than-expected 19% rise in first-half profit today, lifting its shares to a eight-month high.
"We delivered a good performance in the first half with a combination of underlying revenue growth, cash income growth and profit growth," chief executive Paul Zwillenberg said.
"This is on the back of a particularly strong performance in our consumer media and continued growth in our B2B (business to business) portfolio," he added.
Underlying revenue grew 16% at MailOnline, one of the world's leading English language newspaper websites, more than three times the rate recorded for the whole of the company's previous financial year.
"It's great to see MailOnline back to those sorts of levels of growth rates," the company's chief financial officer Tim Collier said.
"That's driven by our ability to get traffic to come direct to our portal or our app, which is particularly encouraging," he added.
Facebook reduced the prominence of news websites on its platform last year, resulting in the number of daily unique browsers on MailOnline falling 7% to 12.7 million.
DMGT, however, was already focusing on the more valuable customers who come directly its site and app.
The rise in revenue from online services and its Metro freesheet more than made up for a 5% decline at its Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday print titles.
Analysts said the market had been expecting a "pretty terrible" set of figures from DMGT given the Brexit uncertainty that continues to stalk the UK economy.
"Little wonder the market is responding positively as first-half numbers turn out to be somewhat better than feared, suggesting the strongest media brands can still attract advertising spend," they added.
DMGT, which also had business-to-business and events divisions, reported pre-tax profits of £100m, up an underlying 19%, on revenue of £724m, up 1% on the same basis, for the six months to March 31.
Analysts had expected profit to come in at £86m.
Shares in the group, which reiterated its full-year guidance, were up 9% today.
The company also said it would increase its interim dividend 3% to 7.3 pence.
