Comments on: Drudge Blows Past a Billion, Nobody Cares

Drudge Blows Past a Billion, Nobody Cares

tsarfan — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:44:38 -0800

Drudge Blows Past a Billion, Nobody Cares If we are to believe his counter, Matt Drudge cleared over a billion page views so far this year, a milestone, certainly, amid a collective yawn to those in the press or those on the web. How could this be? How could one man be apparently so popular while going so unrecognized? Is the Drudge Report the web's dirtiest little secret? And for those of you who are part of the billion, why on Earth do you go there? He doesn't write anything, really. And when he does it's not always true. And the final question is, why hasn't any of the major news services borrowed from his format or style, he's just a guy in a dumb hat after all. Isn't he?

By: tsarfan

tsarfan — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:48:25 -0800

prematurely posted without linking the site in question.

By: tpoh.org

tpoh.org — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:49:57 -0800

I had the 'thrill' of being on the receiving end of an ill-researched Drudge link. Freepers threatened my life because of it.

By: Danelope

Danelope — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:53:52 -0800

Wow. For someone who "doesn't write anything", who is "just a guy in a dumb at", who elicits "a collective yawn", you certainly droned on about him long enough to make a pointless MetaFilter post, tsarfan.

By: ook

ook — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:59:53 -0800

Matt Drudge: the Save Karyn of journalism.

By: letterneversent

letterneversent — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:00:23 -0800

The problem is his site is ugly as sin. Hard to give props otherwise.

By: letterneversent

letterneversent — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:01:24 -0800

Danelope, insulting Drudge is one thing, but cool it on tsarfan.

By: /\/\/\/

/\/\/\/ — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:02:24 -0800

What's good about Drudge: When something big happens, he tells you sooner than any other site, period. I can't count how many important events I learned about because Drudge threw up a size=+3 headline about it within minutes (the most recent example, alas: Wellstone). I am aware of his politics; I understand he sometimes links to dubious sources. As a media consumer, I trust myself to separate the good from the bad.

By: HTuttle

HTuttle — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:03:38 -0800

Is the Drudge Report the web's dirtiest little secret?
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Imagine if this got out!

By: spilon

spilon — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:12:43 -0800

So if he sold text ads at the same ridiculously low rate that, say, MetaFilter does, he could have made over a million dollars already this year, with just one ad placement on his home page. And yet he leaves this money on the table, why?

By: Fupped Duck

Fupped Duck — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:16:44 -0800

I'm proud to say that I contributed not even one of those pageviews.

By: XQUZYPHYR

XQUZYPHYR — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:19:53 -0800

I recall hearing that Amazon recieves about ten billion hits a year. I tried but failed in the archive search: wasn't there a post a bit back about the top 100 visited websites in the world or something like that?

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:21:35 -0800

One billion page hits out of ? unique visitors. Kinda like eBay or FilePlanet.

By: thirteen

thirteen — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:21:47 -0800

Counter queens are nostagia at this point, aren't they?

By: XQUZYPHYR

XQUZYPHYR — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:30:57 -0800

And tsarfan, nobody cares because you don't really provide a reason to. Drudge gets a billion hits a year.... and? /\/\/\/\- Equally partisan sites like Buzzflash do that too... It's not like he has a magic radio that gets the headlines in advance... having the TV on and getting to the computer quicker isn't that big a deal to me... this isn't 1980 when CNN scooped Reagan's shooting hours in advance.

By: lsd4all

lsd4all — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:33:36 -0800

drudge is not as glitzy as CNN or MSNBC, but his site loads instantly and rarely is there more than 2-3 photos on the main page. His headlines are short and to the point. I also checkout cursor.org and debka.com, but I am such a short attention span that I always check out drudge (sometimes up to 10x per hour)

By: hmgovt

hmgovt — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:33:42 -0800

I often see news at forum.fuckedcompany.com first of all, then drudge, then news.BBC.co.uk. It has to be said that links with weight are often found on here.

By: internal

internal — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:02:46 -0800

tpoh.org: Fill us in. What happened? As for Drudge, ditto on the newslinks, his "scoops" are usually just gossip-crap anyway, not much real news.

By: Mayor Curley

Mayor Curley — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:16:39 -0800

why hasn't any of the major news services borrowed from his format It's because his criteria for selection and presentation were stolen. Tass had a patent on that type of objectivity. Flipping it 180 degrees doesn't make it original.

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:33:59 -0800

Anyone have any idea what the front page of drudgereport means today, it says "A photo so tragic it defies description..." and just has some ugly animated gif followed by a link back to the front page.

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:41:06 -0800

bobo123: It's up now. Ack.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:41:53 -0800

If no one cares, why did you post it? Jackass.

By: clango

clango — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:42:42 -0800

it's like news from a drunk guy. i love it.

By: Steve_at_Linnwood

Steve_at_Linnwood — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:43:17 -0800

The Horror!

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 19:03:05 -0800

C'mon, mefites, you should be using drudge.com anyway. XQ: If you mean something other than Alexa's Top 500 Websites, I don't know what it is. It's more affected by non-English sites than I remember, and though Yahoo! remains at #1, Amazon is now at #22.

By: bobo123

bobo123 — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 19:17:49 -0800

Woah. Sorry if I derailed the thread, I thought there was some link or something I was overlooking. Woah that's freaky. Personally I stopped reading drudge after that nonsense about Clinton being the father of a 13 year old boy a while back.

By: inpHilltr8r

inpHilltr8r — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 19:20:05 -0800

The Horror! OK, that's my vote for BANNING IMAGE TAGS decided...

By: Zombie

Zombie — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 19:44:19 -0800

Naaaaggghhhh!!! What the?! What is up with the bit at the bottom? Is all silly putty now and he forgot and pinched it?

By: m@

m@ — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 20:46:33 -0800

I think the key is in: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="240" He must have like 20,000 browsers open to get that kind of hittage. Gives us the uniques Drudgemaster.

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 21:50:34 -0800

Matt Drudge does make oodles of money on advertising. One of his ad reps sent me a report by mistake once, and I was emotionally devastated for days. His site does a few things well, though his own personal reporting isn't one of them. Drudge (and the guy I suspect does more of the day-to-day work, webmaster Andrew Brietbart) stuck with a low-graphic, fast-loading page that has survived traffic spikes way better than any competitors his size, and even though the interface is bad, they've stuck with it so long that readers know how to use it. Most news sites can't say the same thing. Also, Drudge has been aggressively pimping himself from Day 1 -- mentioning every hit count milestone like this one for years and even writing stories about any vaguely important person who complimented him. It had a nice self-fulfilling effect, giving the tech-clueless media a chance to treat him as if he had an audience of millions simply because he had 2 million visits in a month. Finally, Drudge has been a good weblogger since before the weblog existed. He was good at finding stories and pictures on other sites quickly -- even today I don't know of anyone else, with the possible exception of Jorn Barger, who would fish through an obscure database on NorthernLight.Com on Sunday afternoon simply to get a 12-hour scoop on the next week's Newsweek. Though he's an incompetent writer and reporter and a sleazy partisan hack, at least part of the Drudge Report's astonishing success is deserved. (According to Alexa, it's the 335th most popular site on the Internet, thanks to Sidney Blumenthal's idiotic libel suit and ZipperGate.)

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 23:01:47 -0800

As I've noted before, I tried to stop reading Drudge back around the time of these risible posts to rec.arts.movies {don't skim, read the whole thing, trust me}, when he was still considered a spammer rather than a blogger. That was 1995. Clearly, my ignoring him has been wildly successful.

By: The God Complex

The God Complex — Wed, 13 Nov 2002 23:08:38 -0800

I'm sorry, but for a second when I clicked the link to this thread I thought it was a link to a one-sentence entry about web stats at a well-known website posted on somebody's blog ;) Matt should have a Shining moment and axe this mofo.

By: lsd4all

lsd4all — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 02:00:52 -0800

FYI - This is from Matt's Bio on IMDB.com Famous for being the first reporter to break the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton sex scandal story. He's no Woodward or Bernstein, although they do not have a popular website.

By: tsarfan

tsarfan — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 02:43:11 -0800

sorry if you missed the irony, TGC, but the point of the post was the guy hit a billion and the only place that felt ok talking about it were little tiny blogs like that. and not too many of them at that. i dont like the guy either but i do think that he deserves discussion especially after reaching such an enormous plateau.

By: The God Complex

The God Complex — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 04:20:41 -0800

Not without a good link he doesn't ;) But I've said my piece, so I'll happily move along.

By: Ben Grimm

Ben Grimm — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 05:37:29 -0800

Nobody has mentioned that if you linger on his site, it auto-reloads every couple of minutes (or at least it used to back when I actually went there).... doesn't this up the counter? Hello?

By: rcade

rcade — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 05:42:49 -0800

dhartung: Were you around when Drudge reported on Usenet that teen-age fans of Joey Lawrence were so excited at a signing they were "literally lactating"?

By: MegoSteve

MegoSteve — Thu, 14 Nov 2002 06:12:06 -0800

re: dhartung's links... Who knew Drudge started out as Usenet's Weston Esterhazy?

By: Zulujines

Zulujines — Sat, 16 Nov 2002 01:25:28 -0800

i dont like the guy either but i do think that he deserves discussion especially after reaching such an enormous plateau. posted by tsarfan at 2:43 AM PST on November 14
But I thought nobody cared? And what sort of discussion could possibly be had over this? I'm not trying to be harsh, but dude, come on. Steve@L: That was just wrong. Wrong, but funny as hell. The horror!