The Daily Mail (and all the tabloids) mastered clickbait avant la lettre; sensationalist headlines, sex scandal combined with moral outrage, 'celebrity' news, occasional gore, noisy patriotism. That's the news the public want to buy.
The Mail's website has some truly masterful product placement. Go to the sidebar of shame and pick one of the "female celebrity wears clothes in public" articles. Embedded in it will be a very detailed and 'helpful' ad for whatever the celebrity is wearing. Those must be worth a fortune.
I have to say, I'd find those very helpful... Except most celebs wear stuff that doesn't really fit your average fat slob (me), or even most decent people. I always wonder what woman would actually want to wear the trash these people choise, but I guess there must be a lot of them, or that feature would have stopped long ago.
The Daily Mail regularly commits acts of simple journalism. For example, any sort of "it bleeds, it leads" crisis, from terrorism to when a tornado hit my home town killing 160 people, it's a great place to see a bunch of relevant photos and get the basic facts.
They also do this sort of thing, granted, for both, in a sensational style, for a variety of topics that just aren't covered by the US mainstream media monoculture.
(I've never noticed this to be true of any other British tabloid.)
The Daily Mail (and The Sun for that matter) know the profits come from customers who are least likely to use the internet. That's why the Daily Mail differs so much between the internet and newspaper versions.
The Mail's website has some truly masterful product placement. Go to the sidebar of shame and pick one of the "female celebrity wears clothes in public" articles. Embedded in it will be a very detailed and 'helpful' ad for whatever the celebrity is wearing. Those must be worth a fortune.