The Daily Mail and General Trust's Mail Online is the latest UK news website to bar online media monitoring service Meltwater from crawling its content by using the robots.txt site control protocol, paidContent reported yesterday.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom's most visited newspaper website is hoping to find similar successes across the pond; it has opened an office in Los Angeles and hired editorial and sales employees. The newspaper plans to begin producing content for mass-market U.S. audiences and has chosen to remain a free-to-view news site, New Media Age reported today. The news site will explore editorial and sales capabilities around Hollywood-related news, and appears as a tab on the Daily Mail's homepage titled "U.S. Showbiz."

The Daily Mail began behavioural targeting across its U.S. inventory last year - a smart move, as ABC Electronic's monthly reports for the last five months show that more than half of the site's unique users (2.4 million daily) are from outside the United Kingdom, NMA noted.

"U.S. advertisers are looking more to integrated campaigns, tying up mobile with online, for example. More in-depth cross-platform work would be advisable," Matt Adams, head of activation at media agency MEC Global Solutions told NMA.

The move to LA, rather than another large U.S. city such as New York, Chicago or Washington D.C. is also a calculated one. According to April analytics from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, the newspaper's celebrity gossip engages readers for up to 20 minutes a day, longer than any other newspaper site in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile at its home base, blocking the crawling of its content by Meltwater likely won't make much of a difference to the monitoring group, as it claims to crawl more than 115,000 different news sources. Meltwater also has bigger problems, paidContent points out: "Meltwater is currently alone in refusing to pay one of two new licenses which UK newspapers, represented by the Newspaper Licensing Agency, began requiring in January from services which crawl their material."