I just don't get them. How can they afford to publish given that surely no one buys a copy?
Daily Star average circulation: 125624.
So quite a lot of people do buy a copy.
To be fair, though, there were local newspapers doing numbers like that 20 years ago. It is a terrible circulation for a national newspaper.
The real answer, anyway, is that the running costs are low and the owners still make enough money on the advertising to just about make it profitable, plus newspaper owners like to wield influence.
For context, The Mirror, one of the most popular papers only has a circulation of 225,000.
Print media is almost dead.
Yeah the star is the fourth most circulated paper by reported circulation. However most papers have stopped reporting their circulation numbers which gives an indication of how bad things have got for them.
The number one is the metro which is given away free and still only had a circulation of around 900,000.
If you go back 30 years to 2004, the Star was doing 900k, and The Sun, which had top spot, was doing 3.4m!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation
Newspaper circulation is a shadow of what it was. Obviously, many people still read online, but I can't imagine The Star has huge digital numbers.