The Sunday newspaper has thrived on a formula of crime, sex and sensation since its first edition in 1843

From its very first edition on 1 October 1843, the News of the World was clear about who its readers were, and what they wanted to read. Priced at threepence, it was the cheapest paper on news stands, and its publisher, John Browne Bell, was clear what would shift copies: crime, sensation, vice.

Though it was founded with the words "Our motto is the truth, our practice is fearless advocacy of the truth", it was this formula – fast, titillating news, with an emphasis on sensation and, as often as not, sex – that most clearly characterised the paper's journalism, and propelled it to staggering commercial success. By 1880 it was selling 30,000 copies a week. Forty years later, having added a strong emphasis on sport to its heady editorial brew, circulation was more than three million. As the paper's motto put it: "All human life is there."

At its peak, in the 1950s, editions of the paper would regularly sell more than eight million copies.

The decision to close the paper is the more staggering given that it is still the biggest-selling Sunday newspaper in the English-speaking world, with 7.4 million readers each week.

The title claims more than 1.2 million more readers than all three other red-top Sundays – the Sunday Mirror, the People and the Daily Star Sunday – combined, and 50% more than the Mail on Sunday. According to its owners, 15% of British adults read the paper.

But not any more.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given its editorial emphasis, the paper had a parallel reputation for scurrilousness almost from its earliest days.

Shortly into the 20th century, Frederick Greenwood, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, is reputed to have told the paper's proprietor and managing editor, George Riddell, that he had looked at the paper, "and then I put it in the waste-paper basket. And then I thought, 'If I leave it there the cook may read it' – so I burned it!"

It was, however, essential reading. "Each Sunday morning," noted an article in Time magazine in May 1941, "to more than a third of Britain's 11m homes, goes a juicy dish of the week's doings in divorce, scandal, abduction, assault, murder and sport.

"Downstairs, rapt scullery maids devour its spicy morsels; so, upstairs, does many a lady of the house. Farmers, labourers and millworkers cherish its sinful revelations; so also do royalty, cabinet ministers, tycoons.

"Without News of the World, Sunday morning in Britain would lack something as familiar as church bells."

As sales fell off after its postwar high, the paper tried other avenues, commissioning writers including HE Bates and Somerset Maugham to contribute short stories, and featuring Robert Boothby and Aneurin Bevan on its comment pages.

The experiments did not arrest the sales slump, and soon Sir William Emsley Carr, whose family had owned the paper since 1891, appointed editor Stafford Somerfield. He took the paper back to what it did best and instituted a new form of provocative content: the kiss and tell. In 1960 the paper paid the actor Diana Dors £35,000 for a series of titillating stories about her private life. Christine Keeler got £23,000 in 1963 – "a whale of a sum in those days," as she later observed – for the "Confessions of Christine" on the Profumo scandal, which bumped up sales at the "Screws" by 250,000.

Crime, too, was a big seller, and occasionally got the paper into trouble. During the trial of the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1966, it emerged during cross-examination that the key prosecution witness, David Smith, had been paid £1,000 and treated to a holiday in France by the paper in return for his story. The judge asked the attorney general to investigate what "seemed to be a gross interference in the course of justice". The paper escaped contempt charges only narrowly.

By the late 1960s the Carr family was eager to sell, but desperate to avoid doing so to chief suitor Robert Maxwell, who they feared, as a Labour MP, would challenge the paper's conservative politics. He was also a Czech Jew while the News of the World, the paper said in a pointed front page editorial, was "as English as roast beef and yorkshire pudding". Enter a young Australian newspaperman who was eager to make his first inroad into the British market, whose offer on the paper in January 1969, of £34m, was gratefully seized. Rupert Murdoch, then 37, had inherited his wealth and early newspaper interests from his father, but had an expansionist ambition. The Sun, then a broadsheet, would be acquired that year and turned into a tabloid, a change instituted at the News of the World in 1984.

It was to be business as usual – and then some. A further exposé of Keeler's story, seven years after the Profumo scandal, won him censure from the Press Council for its unethical exploitation of sex. Murdoch's response: "People can sneer all they like, but I'll take the 150,000 extra copies we are going to sell." It was a formula from which he has never wavered.

In 1986, News of the World staff followed the example of their colleagues at the Sun in voting overwhelmingly to move to Murdoch's new Wapping plant, breaking the strike of their printworking colleagues.

The paper increased its focus on women – launching Sunday magazine in 1980, and appointing Wendy Henry as its first female editor seven years later. But its core preoccupations – sport, scandal and sex – never varied. Under a succession of combative and hugely influential editors – David Montgomery, Stuart Higgins, Piers Morgan, Phil Hall, Rebekah Wade, Andy Coulson – the Screws scored scoop after scandalous scoop, exposing David Mellor's affair with Antonia de Sancha, David Beckham's relationship with Rebecca Loos, Max Mosley's sado-masochistic sex sessions, and corruption in the Pakistani cricket squad.

Wade, now Brooks, was appointed in 2000, launching a campaign to name and shame paedophiles that was heavily criticised for leading to mobs target people they suspected of being offenders – including, in one case, a paediatrician. The then chief constable of Gloucestershire, Tony Butler, labelled it "grossly irresponsible" journalism.

Coulson succeeded her after three years, but resigned in 2007 when Clive Goodman, the paper's royal correspondent, was jailed for phone hacking. Coulson claimed no knowledge of the illegal practice, saying it was limited to one "rogue reporter", but he bore overall responsibility. Doubtless he, and Murdoch, thought that would be the end of the matter.