Matt Drudge: The Hits Keep on Coming

The New York Observer covers the upcoming launch of the Huffington Report and the need for liberal competition to the Drudge Report.

Reporter Joe Hagan has overlooked the fact that there already are several wanna-be Drudges on the left, including BuzzFlash, Raw Story, and my own Drudge Retort, which I copublish with television writer Jonathan Bourne. Judging by our traffic, most of the world is overlooking us too, though Raw Story is growing fast.

According to the Observer, for fun Matt Drudge likes to load traffic comparisons on Alexa between his site and aspiring rivals.

He'd probably like this Drudge Report vs. Drudge Retort comparison, which makes the Retort's 100,000-hit a day traffic looks like a flat-lining EKG. The only momentary glimmer of life occured in February 2004, when Janet Jackson's breast caused a two- or three-pixel rise.

(Rarely does a day pass without an e-mail from a Drudge Report admirer telling us that Matt's hit count is much, much bigger than ours.)

I'm surprised to read that Drudge is letting Andrew Breitbart leave to join Huffington's site. He's been the unheralded half of the Drudge Report for years, and I suspect a much bigger part of its success than Drudge tells the press, because one-guy-vs-the-media is a better story.

The Drudge Report earns several thousand dollars a day in ad sales and has a staff of two, so I can't imagine that money is the issue. With that kind of income, I'd be sleeping in a bed of gold coins like Uncle Scrooge.

Politics · Publishing · 2005/04/06 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Comments

Sorry RCade. We do what we can.

#1 · whatsleft? · 2005/04/07