Monocle magazine is the ridiculously upmarket, black, perfect-bound monthly title, priced at a distinctly uncredit crunch £5 an issue. Shamelessly international, heavy on design, with features ranging from the latest Turkish high-speed train to a review of an Italian restaurant in Tokyo, it might sound easy to dismiss, but, two years after its launch, Monocle, founded and run by Tyler Brûlé, has survived, with a commercial strategy that is as smart as it looks, with a worldwide sale of about 150,000 an issue.

There are, on this type of thinking, two kinds of reader: fans and the indifferent. Monocle’s strategy is to find fans and then, boy, make money out of them. So, if you missed an issue, back issues cost double – because in the end it is only completists, eyeing an irritating lacuna on the bathroom shelf, who will want to buy. And they might as well pay up.

There are Monocle accessories – bags, pens and Lord knows what else – to buy and of course it is the fans that do, as they rather like being some sort of trans-national club, who fancy flying for a holiday in Costa Rica/Brunei/South Africa. And if you missed them in the magazine, you can head down to a Monocle shop. There is one off Marylebone High Street in London, with others in Los Angeles, or in Mallorca this summer, on the off chance that you happen to be in those locations at the crucial time.

Now, some readers may snort with derision at this point. After all, it would not be hard for more demotic types to describe Monocle as pretentious, although this is in fact unfair. But it does not matter; if there are enough fans you can make good money from them, a strategy that never did Madonna much harm. The snorters – a majority for any publication if you think about it – are irrelevant.

So, you can probably guess the web strategy. You want to be in the club, you subscribe to a year’s worth of issues while everyone else has to make do with more modest pickings, such as a weekly radio show (a hard product to produce on paper), and a copy of a column that Brûlé writes for the Financial Times. There are 10,000 subscribers, who remarkably pay £75 a time – more than the cost of the ten issues a year that Monocle costs at the newsstand. But subscribers get the magazine delivered anywhere in the world, and the online product too. A clear example of the fans who are willing to pay extra.

Compare this model with the way in which newspapers go about their business. Paying readers have a real emotional tie to the titles they buy – the fact newspapers are used for dating demonstrates that – but online the industry seems seduced by a different measure. The perpetual chase for monthly unique users makes the mistake of valuing each visitor equally, when Dorothy, a teenager from Kansas, reading a story about Britney found via Google News is not worth the same as Brendan from Brentwood who visits every day. And yet, all that is known about the loyal readers is their internet address, unless they have had the willpower to complete an online survey. It is daily unique vistors that really matter.

There is one difference that is significant: Monocle, or any other magazine, is a unique blend of features and design; a lot of news on papers’ websites is a commodity that you can get from a number of sources. That, though, is a different discussion; what Monocle shows is that newspapers need to find the fans, because it is they, and only they, who will consider paying online. And at a time when it is not clear how far advertising will rebound, paying customers look like the best idea yet.

— Despair. MPs cheerfully take our money for third homes miles from their constituencies, to claim mortgages that did not exist, or to dredge their moats. Until yesterday, no one resigned from any office amid an unedifying scramble in which, it seems to be believed, the guilty can erase misdemeanours by paying the money back.

Observing all this, few in bars and at breakfast tables are asking how The Daily Telegraph got hold of the revelations. But one day, a fascinating story will be written about how the entire, uncensored, expenses claims ended up in the hands of a newspaper. The data may well have been stolen, although that does not seem to matter right now.

It is not confirmed whether the newspaper paid for its information, but it is widely believed that it did, with guesses in a range of £60,000 to £150,000. Given that sales on Friday last week, the first day, were up 95,000, and ahead in days thereafter, the investment was probably sound. The Telegraph keeps about 60p to 65p of the 90p cover price, so every 100,000 extra copies is worth about £60,000, less the cost of printing.

Chequebook journalism is not a pretty business, although clearly it can be effective. Meanwhile, amid all the wider debates about a creeping privacy law, there have – so far – been no attempts by any MP named and shamed to get an injunction, or to sue for libel.

There may be a Scotland Yard investigation, but the counter argument could be made that breaking the rules in this case was in the public interest.

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