A note on Mail Readership:
During the week the Daily Mail actually only sells 683,530 copies per day, but this swells to a mighty 1.3 million on Saturdays.
In terms of readership, the Daily Mail says this equates to two million readers per day Monday to Friday and 2.9 million on a Saturday with people sharing copies.
According to the Daily Mail, its readers skew 54% female to 46% male. Some 83% are said to be homeowners and 69% own their homes outright.
Some 63% are ABC1 (upper and middle class) and some 366,000 are said to have savings of more £100,000.
The Daily Mail's website reaches some 24 million readers per month in the UK (around half the online audience). This equates to a daily online audience of around four million in the UK.
According to the Daily Mail, the average age of a reader is 56.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/nationals/who-reads-the-daily-mail-circulation-and-readership/
The Mail is the ONLY newspaper which has a higher number of female readers than male readers. It has a higher number of professionals who read it than any of the other tabloids.
To dismiss it as irrelevant or dumbed down or bigoted or even misogynist tends to ignore a lot of these demographic trends. It's a difficult argument to qualify.
We know it tends to attract a higher % of white readers than some other newspapers but it's still got a high number of minority readers.
I believe it does have one of the oldest readerships too BUT it's not losing readers at the highest rate and the key thing is it's market share in the online market - 50% really isn't to be sniffed at.
And THAT is why it's publishing articles like it is.
The argument is that newspapers manipulate the audience - that's only true to an extent. Newspapers have to appeal to their audience in order to have readers. They can't do that if they don't publish stories that the audience isn't interested in reading in the first place. They have to put out stories that the audience feel is relevant.
The right wing / left wing bias only holds to a certain extent as part of that.
We also know that women aged 30 - 50 are particularly key swing voters.
But one of my big concerns is that the Cons will not push the EA clarification issue on sex ahead BEFORE the election for this very reason. It is a key policy to use to persuade voters. In this way they may cynically sell women down river.