Gawker: valleywag, drudgereport

Drudge Fan's iPhone App Helpfully Strips Out Advertising

Ryan Tate — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:53:57 EDT

Oh, look at that: A self-professed fan of blogger Matt Drudge has released iDrudge, an apparently unauthorized iPhone app for reading the Drudge Report. No need to zoom in, like in Mobile Safari. Also: No ads!

One would think author Joseph Nardone might have tried to incorporate some of the Drudge Report's advertising, as a nod to the blogger who made it possible for him to sell this piece of software for 99 cents a pop. But he doesn't; iDrudge merely provides an easy way to access the links Drudge so tirelessly culls from the internet. The notoriously reclusive blogger hasn't responded to an email asking if he plans to fight the app, released just a few days ago.

Whatever Drudge thinks of the app, we're already planning to uninstall, and wait for an app that can be configured to focus exclusively on Drudge's most blatantly gay content.

Debunking the AP's Aggregation Aggravation

Owen Thomas — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:47:04 EDT

Online aggregators are financial vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the news business! You know — evil digital upstarts like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times.

The claim that websites which link to news stories are somehow harming them has been advanced by everyone from Journal editor Robert Thomson to AP chairman Dean Singleton. As geeks like Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (left) have pointed out, they are blithering dunderheads who miss the point that links generate traffic to their own websites. Meanwhile, the doddering newspaper barons' cleverer lieutenants are trying to get into the business themselves.

The proof is in a new study by Hitwise, an online traffic-pattern tracker. Analyst Heather Dougherty has found that search engines, portals, social networks, and blogs generate about 40 percent of the link traffic to news websites, a proportion that has remained more or less unchanged for the past two years. Here's the chart:

Besides search engines, what generates the most traffic for news websites? Other news websites, it turns out. CNN.com, MSNBC, Fox News, the New York Times, and NBC's Weather Channel rank in the top 10 traffic sources to the news and media category, according to Dougherty's study.

Techmeme's Rivera argues that news organizations complaining about aggregators aren't just wrongheaded — they're hypocrites, too, he told CNET News:

[The] WSJ (a News Corp. property) and NYT (a key AP member) are both themselves news aggregators. Both maintain sections which quote headlines from external sites. So, constituents of these organizations already know aggregation is useful and fair. This knowledge just hasn't reached AP's and News Corp.'s leadership.

The implication: The newspaper industry's real problem isn't that sites like Google News and Techmeme exist. It's that they don't own them.

(Photo via Gabe Rivera)

The fall of Drudge is greatly exaggerated

Jordan Golson — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Is the Drudge Report shrinking? One blog thinks so, and cites Alexa data — by far the most inaccurate of the website-measurement sites — to prove it. Is Drudge shrinking? No, but it also isn't growing as fast as some other sites, including the 3-year old Huffington Post. HuffPo has certainly grown its readership, recently passing 3 million unique visitors per month. But where it really matters — total visits and daily uniques, the number of people who come back every day — Drudge continues to dominate. All the more impressive, since Drudge maintains a tiny two-person staff, while HuffPo's fills a SoHo office. The sites compared by (more accurate) numbers:

Why bloggers should rejoice at being passed up for the Pulitzers

Jordan Golson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won.

The Pulitzer Prize is a curious award to seek. It rewards obtuse articles on public policy, favoring newspapers with expansive Washington bureaus and reporters with D.C. connections. That's not a game that pageview-seeking online reporters particularly care to play. But if they did? They wouldn't likely win. Consider a list of online stories some sources suggested as Pulitzer-worthy:

Matt Drudge's breaking of the Newsweek spike of Isikoff's Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story
Charles Johnson of Little Green Football's debunking of the George Bush Air National Guard memos
The Smoking Gun's debunking of author James Frey's memoir
Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo's reporting on the U.S. attorney-firing scandal

Marshall's post comes closest; it won him a Polk award. But online reporters would do well to ignore the Pulitzers, rather than froth about their exclusion. They can reach an audience far larger than a parochial newspaper. And if they do manage to influence policy with their reporting? That in itself should be the prize.

Drudge and Kos readers are addicted

Jordan Golson — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:00:00 EDT

There are many, many ways to count Web audiences. Pageviews and time spent are the two most commonly watched metrics, and they’re reasonably easy to understand. Now Nielsen says it wants to use “sessions per person per month” to tally up visitors to popular news sites. Matt Drudge got ahold of the latest rankings and linked them prominently on his Drudge Report — no surprise, since he dominates the rankings. Nielsen puts Drudge Report at 19.9 sessions per person in February — roughly once per weekday. Liberal community news site DailyKos comes up second with 8.9 sessions per person. Get the rest of the list after the jump.

Top 30 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations, ranked by Sessions per Person
Brand or channel; sessions per person; unique audience (000)
1. drudgereport.com; 19.9; 3,445
2. Daily Kos^; 8.9; 1,204
3. Fox News Digital Network; 8.3; 10,177
4. CNN Digital Network; 7.9; 37,181
5. AOL News; 7.7; 21,119
6. Yahoo! News; 7.4; 35,274
7. MSNBC Digital Network; 6.4; 34,013
8. ksl.com^; 6.0; 796
9. Breitbart.com; 5.3; 2,674
10. Google News; 5.3; 12,050
11. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division; 5.1; 13,998
12. NYTimes.com; 4.9; 18,975
13. Netscape; 4.8; 2,709
14. Townhall.com; 4.7; 1,152
15. Media General Newspapers; 4.6; 1,761
16. GTGI Network 4.5; 1,345
17. Star Tribune; 4.3; 2,108
18. TWC News Websites; 4.1; 840
19. NewsMax.com; 4.0; 4,054
20. Zwire^; 3.9; 1,089
21. Cox Newspapers; 3.9; 5,197
22. washingtonpost.com; 3.8; 10,441
23. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; 3.8; 1,259
24. The Buffalo News^; 3.7; 502
25. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 3.6; 1,472
26. MediaNews Group Newspapers; 3.5; 5,850
27. USATODAY.com; 3.5; 10,571
28. WorldNow 3.5; 10,588
29. IB Websites; 3.4; 7,565
30. St. Louis Post Dispatch^; 3.4; 1,022

^ Indicates Home and Work audience duplication projections did not meet minimum sample size standards. Combined home and work audience estimates for these sites may exhibit increased variability month-to-month as a result.

This data, also from Nielsen Online, shows the monthly traffic and other data for newspaper-based Web sites for February 2008:

66,456,096 - monthly unique audience for newspaper sites, an increase of 13.2 percent (year over year)
41 percent - active reach, an increase of 9.4 percent (year over year)
3,064,613,644 - total page views on newspaper sites, an increase of 8.5 percent (year over year)
46.05 - page views per person

Slobbering pup uncovers Digg's true purpose

Jordan Golson — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:00:44 EST

I've always preferred editorially controlled news sources like Fark and the Drudge Report. I'm more likely to find links that I think are interesting. On "social news" sites like Digg, readers get endless Ron Paul and Apple links, as fanboys constantly vote for their preferred subjects. Occasionally though, something else makes it to the top of the social news pile.

Yesterday, a video of a pug puppy licking a screen got more than 14,000 Diggs. This from a website where a link is considered popular if it gets more than 1,000 Diggs. I'm relieved to have finally found the purpose for "social sites" like Digg or YouTube: the 21st-century version of America's Funniest Home Videos. Nothing meaningful ever happens, but it's a fun diversion.

For what it's worth, America's Funniest Home Videos remains massively popular and profitable. But no one mistakes it for the future of news. And what are the odds someone would pay $300 million for an online version of it?

Drudge launches mobile site, reports busiest month ever

Jordan Golson — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:23:00 EST

The Drudge Report is the homepage for many news junkies — myself included. That's likely because Matt Drudge has never really jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon — no comments, no voting on stories, no submitting stories (except through the anonymous tips box) for peer review, no videos, no lolcats. The site has pretty much been the same since it launched in the late '90s — until today!

TAKE DRUDGE WITH YOU, ANYWHERE... OPENING OF IDRUDGEREPORT.COM FOR MOBILE DEVICES... FURIOUS AND FAST, HEADLINES ONLY... IDRUDGEREPORT.COM...

I opened the site on my iPhone and got a list of the same headlines that are currently on drudgereport.com, but without ads or the lengthy list of links to news sources and columnists. Clicking a link informs you that the link you clicked may not be formatted for a mobile device and offers to email you the link so you can read it when you get back to your computer. Nifty.

In addition to that, the Drudge main page was viewed 455,157,569 times in November — the busiest month in the site's 12-year history. It's important to note, however, that that number is pageviews, not unique readers, and the site has an autorefresh set to 3 minutes. If you leave the page open on your computer, as many readers do, you'll account for 20 views an hour. Even discounting that effect, the site is astoundingly popular for a two-man operation.

King of the bloggers

Paul Boutin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:25:43 EDT

"Drudge, Drudge, Drudge. One can only imagine the particular kind of loathing the Dickensian music of that name must inspire in White House staffers," observed Steve Silberman a decade ago. Today, Matt Drudge curdles the whey of journalists and bloggers, too. At 16 million visits, a slow day on drudgereport.com is still an order of magnitude beyond the New York Times's website. Drudge even beats the 10 million or so auto-delivered daily to MSN by Internet Explorer (DISCLAIMER: I write for MSN. And you don't.) As the world's most-read standalone journalist, Matt Drudge makes Instapundit Glenn Reynolds — 198,000 daily visits — seem like a piker. So it always brings a smile to watch tech bloggers jockey for position. Robert Scoble, #43 on the latest hot list, gets props for publishing his blog's stats yesterday, but reality check: Even the Scobleizer's fan club measures under one-half of a millidrudge.

News blog Drudge Report doesn't list Fark.com...

Owen Thomas — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:11:32 EDT

News blog Drudge Report doesn't list Fark.com on its blogroll of sources. But a tell-tale URL on a story about emigration from Britain shows that Matt Drudge does, in fact, read the edgy social news site. [Drudge Report]