You may not like it, but MailOnline is a digital innovator

An all-girl pop group sunbathing by an LA pool; a reality TV star in a "skimpy" dress; "naked models locked in embrace"... these are just some of the headlines of stories currently being clicked on and read by millions of loyal MailOnline readers right now. With 3.14 million daily unique readers in February, the digital version of the Daily Mail Loading... products daily-mail is by a distance the UK’s most popular newspaper website and has enjoyed a 40 percent increase in traffic in the last 12 months.

And to add to its growing success, the site picked up the award for Digital Innovation at the Press Awards in London last night, beating The Times Loading... products the-times , The Guardian and the Telegraph. No one can argue with Mail Online Loading... companies dailymailcouk ’s popularity, but is it innovative? I was at the awards and some guests and twitterers questioned whether the celeb-heavy site deserved the accolade, preferring the gong went to a more worthy journalistic endeavour. To be honest, I questioned it myself when the nominations came out. But here’s why I think MailOnline is an innovator and has changed popular online publishing in the UK and beyond.

The List

The MO site is dominated by its right-hand sidebar containing its Femail section content and, below it, some editor-chosen “Don’t Miss” stories. This is how people navigate the site: they arrive, browse the list and click something that looks fun and diverting. The List is on every page, driving more clicks from each visit. It’s that simple.

There need not be any clever methods to distribute this stuff – half of visits are direct clicks – and MailOnline proves that the vast majority of online readers still simply visit a site and see what has changed since they were last there. Front pages matter and straight-forward navigation matters even more.

It knows what people want to read, and share

Yes, MailOnline likes pictures of women – preferably not wearing very much. I count at least seven stories using pictures of women in bikinis on the site now, with two more using “bikini” or “boobs” in the headline. But the fluctuating weight and physical condition of famous people is what people like reading about – the Mail is merely serving its audience. And its audience like to share: some 10 percent of traffic comes via Facebook Loading... companies facebook , which MailOnline exec Martin Clarke calls a “gigantic free marketing engine”.

Soap stars on the beach isn’t Pulitzer prize-winning stuff, but the content from the paper is in the middle of the front page and you can click on that if you want too. There is genuine news here: the bank worker fired for a Facebook post comparing her £7-an-hour wage to a boss’s £4,000-an-hour pay packet, for example, plus lots of middle market news mainstays you would expect such as tax and immigration. Mail execs reportedly claim only a quarter of traffic is driven by “showbiz” stories.

As Douglas McCabe of Enders told The Guardian recently, to say Mail Online is all about boobs and bums, “Underrates the power of the Mail brand in its various manifestations. It’s about being really aware of audience needs and audience behaviours in different environments. There is a subtlety to what they are doing.”

It understands loyalty

Because Mail Online knows what people like reading, they keep coming back for more. The flow of news, new pictures and features throughout the day reflects reading patterns. The Guardian’s James Robinson, quoting Mail sources, reported that around 1.8 million people visit the site 10 or more times a month or more – the same readers consume 68 percent of its pages. Anecdotally, when I talk about digital publishing with non-media industry people, it is invariably the site that people say they read, particularly women.

It may yet prove that free, ad-supported publishing can work

In the year to date digital-only display ad revenue is up 121 percent (via paidContent:UK). The actual revenue figure isn’t broken out but that’s quite some growth. And this is a new, younger audience who don’t buy newspapers: 78 percent of UK MailOnline readers don’t buy the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday. These are the readers that the (printed) newspaper industry is losing every day. the Mail is moving into ad-funded models with its smartphone app too.