The satirical news website the Daily Mash, which provided the inspiration for the Nish Kumar BBC comedy show The Mash Report, has been sold for £1.2m.

The site is known for spoof headlines such as “It wasn’t worth it, says 103-year-old vegetarian”, “Only people who still want Brexit are inexplicably angry posh couple with two labradors”, and “Man worried he’s the last of his friends to have an article in Guardian”.

Its co-founders Paul Stokes and Neil Rafferty, former national newspaper reporters, are in line for a payday after they agreed to sell the site’s parent company, Mashed Productions, to Digitalbox, a media company in Bath.

The Daily Mash has a loyal following built up during 12 years of publishing. Despite the site’s relatively high profile, its parent company recorded revenues of £396,000 and a profit before tax of £135,000 in the last financial year, showing the tight budgets in ad-supported online publishing.

The site, which has two full-time members of staff and relies on a pool of freelance writers, will become part of Digitalbox, which also owns the website Entertainment Daily. The combined business is intending to list on the Aim stock market next month and then acquire other digital publishers.

In a decidedly un-Daily Mash statement to the stock market, the new parent company said the site was “capable of consistently generating high-quality, original humour content which is extremely hard to replicate” and “has increasingly turned its attention to satirising social tribes and trends to produce highly viral content of a more timeless nature that has a much broader and longer appeal than daily news”.

The Daily Mash attracted 1.8 million visitors a month, the vast majority of them in the UK and most of them coming from social media referrals from the likes of Facebook.

Rafferty, the Daily Mash’s editor-in-chief, said: “This is a great opportunity for the Mash to build on what we have created so far. My co-founder, Paul Stokes, did an incredible job building a profitable business from the ground up.”

The site has occasionally spread confusion, notably when Sky News inadvertently read out a spoof Daily Mash headline claiming the former London mayor Ken Livingstone had a pet newt called Adolf, at the height of claims about antisemitism in the Labour party.