Drudging Up The News

One of the web sites I visit almost every day is The Drudge Report.  It looks like I am not alone.

The New York Times reports today on "How Drudge Has Stayed on Top" out of all news sites even though the 14-year old site is a relic by web standards.  No web site beyond Google drives more traffic to other news sites than Drudge.  In fact, Drudge accounts for more than twice the referrals to other news sites than Facebook.  It all adds up to traffic of about 12 to 14 million unique visitors every month.

How does Matt Drudge continue to attract all those eyeballs month after month?

“When you look at his influence, it cuts across all kind of sites, both traditional news outlets and online-only sites,” said Amy S. Mitchell, the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and one of the authors of the study. “He was an early and powerful force in setting the news agenda and has somehow maintained that even as there has been a great deal of change in the way people get their news.”

With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. “It’s a real achievement,” said John F. Harris, the co-founder of Politico. “I covered the Clinton White House in 1997 and 1998 and I would never have conceived that he would be an important player in the landscape 12 years later. He does one thing and he does it particularly well. The power of it comes from the community of people that read it: operatives, bookers, reporters, producers and politicians.”

So in a news age when the next big thing changes as often as the weather, how can a guy who broke through on the Web before there was broadband still set the agenda? How can that be?

His durability is, first and foremost, a personal achievement, a testament to the fact that he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me, “the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.”

On Thursday, a fairly straightforward Reuters article about a NATO attack on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound occupied the skyline of the site with a particularly odious picture of the strongman girded by a headline that blared, “NEXT UP: NATO GOING FOR THE KILL.” Underneath, there were tons of links, news and pictures (Mr. Drudge has a real knack for photo editing) with all kinds of irresistible marginalia: “Desperate Americans Buy Kidneys from Peru Poor” was just above an article about what a prolific e-mailer Osama bin Laden was in spite of his lack of access to the Internet.

Yes, Mr. Drudge is a conservative ideologue whose site also serves as a crib sheet for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But if you believe that his huge traffic numbers are a byproduct of an ideologically motivated readership, consider that 15 percent of the traffic at WashingtonPost.com, which is not exactly a hotbed of Tea Party foment, comes from The Drudge Report.

Bear in mind that this was a guy that was working for CBS in 1995.  Not CBS News.  He worked in the CBS Studios Gift Shop in LA and started The Drudge Report on the side. He first gained real recognition as the first outlet to break the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal in 1998.

The Drudge Report is a must read every day.  As the Times story states, "Everyone goes there because, well, everyone else goes there".  If you are not going there...you should.