This seems like a power move to gain international traction, but it immediately discounts it as a good source for national news, as it traditionally has been.
Guardian has been making a loss for years [1] in the difficult UK market, it's future is as an international orientated news source. I want them to stick around so I welcome the expansion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian (search "loss")
(aside: the majority of voters for all three of the big parties in the UK read the Daily Mail, of them that read a print newspaper.)
It says the Daily Mail has a circulation of about 1.8m daily, the Guardian has a circulation of about 200k daily. The Sun is the most widely bought newspaper, at 2.4m daily, but they're all declining across the board.
The Mail hasn't had daily sales over 4 million this millennium. But since you apparently overestimate the guardians sales by 100% too I guess the point you're making still stands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...
Sales figures obviously give a much more concrete number for comparing paper to paper, but if you're trying to make a comparison to TV viewers or some other type of media maybe the readership numbers are more meaningful.
That is not to say that it wouldn't like to make a profit. But it doesn't 'need to' to survive as its money is generated by its parent company Guardian News & Media which is then plowed back in the paper and the trust. GNM does very nicely. Until relatively recently it owned the UK arm of AutoTrader. It also owns a lot of local talk radio stations and newspapers which turn a tidy profit. The irony is that many of these sources are more closely aligned politically to the Daily Mail that the Guardian.
The Guardian is extremely sociliast in its reporting. That's just not popular. You're not going to make any profit with that political viewpoint. (Although you'll certainly be popular on Reddit, the BBC, and other left leaning communities).
To make money, you need to be center / center right to appeal to most people. That's why newspapers like "The Sun" and "Daily Mail" absolutely dwarf "The Gruaniad" in readership.
If anything, to me it smacks of hypocracy rather than irony. It would be like a campaign setup to promote vegetarianism, bankrolled by a side venture selling beef burgers.
The tabloid equivalent of a left newspaper (though the terms make much less sense since the tabloids aren't nearly as political) would be the Daily Mirror, and it more than holds its own in the circulation wars.
The relative popularity of the Sun and the Daily Mail is best explained by Jim Hacker and friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M&t=1m0s
In other words, a classical broadsheet vs. tabloid situation. Politics doesn't sell as well as gossip and T&A.
When I used to buy papers a few times a week, I rotated the Guardian, The Independent and the Telegraph.
If you went outside the news articles the Guardian was foaming at its mouth, agenda crazy leftie. The editors, opinions and letters pages were filled with rubbish. Far more than the Telegraph was politely right wing.
Perhaps they've toned it down since focusing online, but though I don't read the site I still come across op pieces linked in various places that show otherwise.