NY Times: How Drudge Has Stayed on Top

[alp227]

For most big news Web sites, about 60 percent of the traffic is homegrown, people who come directly to the site by dint of a bookmark or typing in www.latimes.com or www.huffingtonpost.com. The other critical 40 percent comes by referrals, the links that are the source of drive-by traffic, new readers and heat-seekers on a particular story.

By far, most of the traffic from links comes from the sprawling hybrid of Google search and news, which provides about 30 percent of the visits to news sites, according to a report released last week by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center. And the second? Has to be Facebook, right? Nope. Then Twitter must be the next in line. Except it isn’t.

Give up? It’s The Drudge Report, a 14-year-old site — a relic by Web standards — conceived and operated by Matt Drudge. Using data from the Nielsen Company to examine the top 21 news sites on the Web, the report suggests that Mr. Drudge, once thought of as a hothouse flower of the Lewinsky scandal, is now more powerful in driving news than the half-billion folks on Facebook. (According to the study, Facebook accounted for 3.3 percent of the referrals to news sites, less than half as many as generated by The Drudge Report.)

“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.”

Full story; or catch it on page B1 (business section) of Monday's Times.

[FrenchieCat]

1. that's cause that is where the mainstream media and the Righties go first.....

that's why they own the news.....well, the part that hasn't been cancelled anyways.

[TexasProgresive]

2. I used to go to his site daily, but no more.

One of the reasons for his high hit rate is that the site does some sort of auto refresh every few minutes even though there is no new content. So, if someone goes to that site for 30 minutes he will get 10 or so hits. Links used leave the site with a return generating another hit. I don't think this is accidental but leads to a false high rating.