I see my work has been done for me. Anyway, I got my data from Alexa. Plug in Drudgereport into Alexa - it is well behind traditional media news sites and even behind non-traditional ones like Huffington Post. http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News Part of the reason for Drudge's decline in relevance probably has to do with its user demographics, which appears to skew very white, very male, and very old: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/drudgereport.com
how do you explain why drudge's sessions per person is double that of CNN & Fox? wrong! CNN unique visitors=37K drudge unique visitors=3K
I have never been to Drudge Report. To be honest, I didn't really know what it was until South Park mentioned it in the internet episode. I get most of my news from Yahoo, CNN, and Clutchfans.
I clicked the link, and wow I never would have believed it could have had that outdated of a look. Awful looking site.
Doesn't he just post links to other stories? Seems like a lot of people would go there to have a bunch of stories in one place. What's the big deal?
Wow. Site looks horrible. My 10th grade tech teacher was really just a cheerleader coach sidelining as a tech teacher would be embarrassed.
Not sure. I'd have to research that. A lot of websites have auto-refresh. It is not some sort of underhanded taboo technique that only a-holes use. If drudge's site is not popular, then why are we even talking about it here? It is popular and widely known to the general public. That being said, I do NOT consider it a real news site. All he does is post links to "real" news sites. There is hardly any real content and it is more entertaining than informative. He is clearly biased. I think it is important to acknowledge that biased websites are spread all across the political spectrum (ie. Huffington Post, Dailykos, etc.) . The right does not have a monopoly on biased reporting - despite what some on this board may profess. Since I am biased myself, I do not think he's as biased as a liberal may think. To deny any bias at all would be ludicrous though. Likewise, some liberals probably take Huffington Post as more objective than it really is.
But Drudge isn't ranked highly at all using the unique views measure. He's only ranked highly based on sessions/user and pageviews (the auto-refresh thing). The high sessions/user generally means that more of his people keep visiting over and over as opposed to people who go to CNN/etc. Generally, the most likely explanation for this is that Drudgies are highly dedicated, and lots probably have it as their homepage, whereas people who use mainstream news sites probably don't have it as their homepage by as large a ratio.
Nothing grinds my gears worse than some chowderhead that doesn't know when to keep his big trap shut.
Easy access to lots of stories and link to papers, and excepting for his political bias, you can sometimes gauge what the popular stories of the day are. Another decent place I've started looking at is Newser.com, like Alex Wolff's columns.
Yeah, I was shocked too. The site seems to cater to this outdated ideology wherein tax breaks for folks makings a couple of hundred thousand a year are viewed as helpful for most Americans. It seems he was even asupporter of Bush-Cheney to the bitter end. Very outdated.
Not surprised at all by your comments, which illustrate why Drudgereport becomes more irrelevant each day. A website that gets this kind of reaction from new visitors can't go anywhere but down. Nobody said it had no popularity, but it's in severe decline from it's peak and most people couldn't care less now.
I disagree - even at its peak, it's value really wasn't in the number of people visiting the site that gave it power. It's the number of media members that used the site as a quick resource, and thus the subtle influence he had in shaping stories. We saw some of this during both the campaign and this summer's tea parties and health care debate where Drudge still was able to help shape stories. He managed to shape the media reporting of poll numbers fairly well - he would just point out flukish polls or the worst case ones and the media would use those numbers in their more professional reports. As far as the outdated look, that has some effect, but relatively little. Just look at the popularity of Craigslist. There's some real value in fast page loads and no bells and whistles.
Like I said in an earlier post, it doesn't seem like the major media take very many cues from Drudge. So he's losing on both counts. IMO, his practice of pointing out flukey polls last year damaged his credibility.
Here's an example of the value of Drudge as a news aggregator. They have a flash headline "Tiger Woods seriously injured in car crash" - no other national news has it as of yet. But it links to a local news story: http://www.wesh.com/news/21740162/d...orl_break&ts=T&tmi=orl_break_1_01210111272009 His site is still a very effective place to get breaking news.
