Of course, 24/7 Wall Street has the advantage of being able to conjure made-up estimates out of thin air; that's how the site put a price tag on various blog networks back in February (PerezHilton.com: $32 million (ha); Gawker Media: $170 million (HA!)). Now the site's taken those made-up estimates and combined them with additional made-up estimates of how much each blog network would be worth without its iconic founder. In other words, it's estimating the economic worth of each blogging boss — not to be confused with their actual wealth.

Here are the numbers. Spoiler: Drudge is king, even in hypothetical death.

(Correction: This post originally said 24/7 Wall Street was an AOL property. It is in fact independent.)

Gawker Media's Nick Denton: $26 million. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but it's only 15 percent of his company's hypothetical net worth, since Denton doesn't do much writing or editing. "Gawker would miss the guiding hand, but presumably the company could get another skilled CEO." (Pic: Eliot Shepard via mednut on Flickr)

Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington: $23 million. Huffington is the face of her company, 24/7 correctly notes, lending it valuable "star power and relationships." But the site overestimates the extent to which Huffington has delegated control to "highly skilled editorial staff:" although she's made some promising recent hires from the likes of the Washington Post, Huffington has stocked the wide-ranging site with nepotistic hires willing to abide her detailed (headlines, story placement, story assignments) and wide-ranging orders. As such, she's probably at least twice as essential to the organization as 24/7 estimates (25 percent of HuffPo's $90 million net worth). (Pic: JD Lasica)

Drudge Report's Matt Drudge: $43 million. That's 90 percent of his site's estimated $48 million value. Sure, Drudge has in the past received help from swell guys like Andrew Breitbart (no longer working for him), but they hardly had the skill to open email messages containing Republican talking points and newsroom leaks: "Drudge obviously has editors working for him to gather the hundreds of links from other media but the scoops that run on the sites are almost certainly his."

PerezHilton.com's Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira: $30 million. The jizz-doodling celebrity gossip blogger is obviously an irreplaceable genius i 24/7's eyes: Without him, says the website, "the $32 million value of PerezHilton.com would go to under $2 million." Right, except for the fact that Lavandeira's got his sister and probably others actually writing/doodling the damned thing on his behalf. And since 1> Perez Hilton isn't anyone's real name to begin with and 2> his sister doesn't go around calling people "fags" like Lavandeira does, she might actually be able to make the site more popular.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington: $12.5 million. Sure, TechCrunch's flagship tech business blog has "more than 20 senior writers, editor and business staff," but Arrington is "a controversial and polarizing figure," so he's worth half the company's total imaginary valuation of $50 million. (Pic: Robert Scoble)

The rest: MacRumors' Arnold Kim, a onetime doctor is estimated worth $4.2 million to his $21 million site; GigaOm's Om Malik accounts for $2.9 million of his tech blog network's $9.5 million value; Mashable's Pete Cashmore is estimated worth $1.25 million, or half of his tech blog's $2.5 million value; Business Insider's Henry Blodget $1.5 million or two-thirds of the total value of his financial blogging company; Markos Moulitsas (pictured) $1.7 million of political blog Daily Kos' $2 million made-up value. (Pic: Steve Rhodes)

It seems 42-year old Drudge, who spent many of his early years publishing on AOL, misunderstood the fundamental technology behind iDrudge. He thought the app was reading a pirated copy of the Drudge Report running on someone else's server, app creator Joseph Nardone told iPhone Savior. When it was explained to him that the app just downloaded the Drudge Report from Drudge's regular servers, and neatly reformatted it, he emailed Apple and asked for the app to be reinstated.

At the moment, the app still has not returned to App Store; Apple's approval process can take weeks, so Drudge's initial email is probably seriously cutting into Nardone's income, considering that iDrudge was once the store's number one news app. Imagine: Something inaccurate, written by Matt Drudge, causing people grief. Unprecedented.

Apparently Drudge is not bothered by the lack of advertising on the iDrudge app; as Nardone wrote in a comment we just now saw and approved under our original post, Drudge himself offers an ad-free mobile version of his site:

Hi:

Thanks for the publicity. The intent of the iDrudge Drudge Reader app was not to remove advertising from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report already has a version with no ads at iDrudgeReport.com. The intention of the iDrudge Drudge Reader was to allow people who would not otherwise be able to view the Drudge Report on an iPhone due to the inconvenience of using the Safari browser to view the site. This should actually increase the traffic to the Drudge Report site and increase it's ability to attract revenue. The iDrudge Drudge Reader is merely a specialized web browser that is preset to view the Drudge Report.

Sincerely,
Joseph Nardone

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.

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
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• Charles Johnson of Little Green Football's debunking of the George Bush Air National Guard memos
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• 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.

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

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.