Brit Tourists Die Daily: The 'Daily Mail' Monster Business Model

The internet is agog with the news that the Daily Mail gets more traffic than the Huffington Post — some 40 million uniques in a month now. (This is sort of like saying that bacon “gets more traffic” than sausages, in a way: people just like breakfasts meats, just as they adore celebrity nipples.) The Daily Mail, unlike the HuffPo, also sells 1.9 million newspapers a day — astounding numbers to American newspaperpeople. (That’s extremely close to the total daily circulation of the Washington Post plus the LA Times plus the New York Times. For real.) Still, almost 2/3rds of their web traffic is from outside of the UK. Their secret isn’t just celebrity nipples though, to be fair. It’s also old-school, small-town newspaper-style death and disaster. The magical thing about the UK is that their tourists are constantly being murdered in Sarasota or plunging to their deaths in Thai waterfalls. It’s like the whole country is the cast of a Final Destination movie. As long as the UK’s number one export is woe-begotten folks on holiday, that’s cash in the bank.