Drudge
I find Drudge very depressing today. It’s probably due to the prominent place given to the Democrats being sworn into power in the House, and the sense of deja vu combined with a sinking feeling that I’ve often had in the last decade or two, of things slipping away and time running out.
But I happened to notice something on the page I’d never seen before. I’m not a daily Drudge devotee, but I go there now and then just to see what people are talking about. Today I noticed a little line in the lower right of the page that says this:
VISITS TO DRUDGE 1/3/2019
029,718,569 PAST 24 HOURS
I knew Drudge was influential and had enormous traffic, but 30 million a day?
Anyone able to tell me why? There are plenty of other news aggregates, but what’s his secret?
I know the page started as a gossip column (back in 1995) and in some ways retains aspects of that. I recall that Andrew Breitbart was part of its early growth. I know that Drudge was instrumental in breaking the Lewinsky story.
But why is it still so popular? It’s got an archaic design—hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Is it mostly habit that accounts for the huge amount of traffic, or is there something else I’m missing?
That Drudge Wiki entry describes the site as conservative. I think that used to be more true than it is now. It also says the site has 3 million visitors a day, which seems more in line with reality; probably the disparity in figures represents the difference between visits and visitors. Perhaps a lot of people check the site over and over and over, compulsively, during a single day.
The MSM uses bots to re-visit his website constantly throughout the day.
It’s their dirty secret… only admitted occassionally.
It’s an ESSENTIAL information node for those players.
I can’t explain Drudge’s numbers. I look at it once every couple of days. I’ve looked at it less and less it seems Drudge has a Never Trump vein running through it.
I voted for the man with my nose plugged but I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far. I have gone from reluctantly defending him to wholeheartedly defending him.
And Drudge seems to revel in spreading the initial fake news burst, effectively amplifying the signal of MSNBCNN. Sure he corrects it later, but he jumps on the bandwagon first.
Maybe I just never noticed it before President Trump.
Anyone able to tell me why? There are plenty of other news aggregates, but what’s his secret?
i could say, but why bother?
i helped build up moonbattery too – now its large enough for lots of ads!
was a founder of MGTOW movement….
so why would anyone care about how drudge is succeeding?
and I will say almost ALL of the musings that will come out will be wrong…
big wrong…
here is an example from fractal rabbit…
And Drudge seems to revel in spreading the initial fake news burst, effectively amplifying the signal of MSNBCNN. Sure he corrects it later, but he jumps on the bandwagon first.
really? what does drudge say? drudge exposes the liars…
Drudge writes NOTHING… so he amplifies NOTHING
so the above point is a made up piece of bs that is common
its the kind of thing i been batching here about people doing when they dont know
I even coined a term for it…
MENTAL SPACKAL
ie. you use it to plaster up the holes in your mind rather than a real repair with real information!!!
the more of the garbage you eat, the less you can work out how things work
young people are less effective than young people yesterday cause they watch programs that warp relationships (cause and effect is abnormal), they watch physics be warped (so their brain knows fake physics) and on and on
i could write a druge package for neo in a weekend and have it up in a week
but since neo doesnt fight the fight, i have not bothered… waste of time
if you want to know how things work
then stop pissing in the well of understanding…
stop warping principals and for god sakes, admit you dont know and want to have a real answer over all others, especially witty trendy made up crap
Fractal Rabbit is basically bloviating out of nothing…
I can’t explain Drudge’s numbers. I look at it once every couple of days. I’ve looked at it less and less it seems Drudge has a Never Trump vein running through it.
no. he doesnt.. he has no trend… you confuse the trend in the press as drudges
if you randomly selected the top stories and just list links to them, your going to then reflect the underling bias of the pool your selecting from… you would have to have a bias to negate it..
and i laugh at the explanations for years
ever think that drudge makes his readers HAPPY?
ever think that catering to people dont make them HAPPY?
people dont like me cause i value validity over peace…
so i dont get invited to fun parties much, but everyhone calls me endlessly to fix their problems, and help them start companies, and even a senator friend asks for advice
why?
because i do the same thing drudge does
but why would anyone ‘get’ that? or waht “that” is anymore?
integrity
brutal honesty
commitment
consistency
no favorites
you just dont know what it looks like
but you can tell it when you see it even if yo dont konw
the persons succeed despite horrid weight on them, and people dont know why
hey neo. its my 15 year and they still trying to get rid of me, but they cant
and thye are so frustrated now… its cuasing them to hurt themselves
i know so many that do this… they all seem “lucky”
drudge gets huge numbers because brutal truth has a value unto itself
which is why i am tolerated…
even here…
ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
Blert, web crawlers are not counted in the totals… duh
read about robots.txt if you dont want to be indexed
however its easy to filter them out of your totals…
[even neo doesnt necessarily beleive i have crawled
through the whole site and did stats on it!!! reality checks]
here is neos robot.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Drudge doesnt even have that…
A druge page is a very small thing compared to most sites
The Internet Is Mostly Bots / More than half of web traffic comes from automated programs—many of them malicious. and they are about 52% of traffic
here are numbers from druge page
VISITS TO DRUDGE 1/3/2019
029,718,569 PAST 24 HOURS
802,664,159 PAST 31 DAYS
11,266,894,500 PAST YEAR
one reason drudge is high numbers is that people make it their home page..
the other reason is that they have a clock on the page, so if you leave it up, it reloads every few minutes…
but the real reason is the same reason people tolerate me at all…
brutal honesty has its value… and linking to it is as good as carrying it yourself
[by the way, it would be VERY easy for the websites to block drudge links… but they dont…heh]
from 2017, no time to get better..
and who cares anyway… just going to not like it.
between September 2015 and August 2016 for around 53 million desktop-user Associated Press page views. Or, per this report, 37% of that overall type of traffic for ap.org during the period.
That’s the highest such percentage in the list of Top 15 most referred-to websites. The Hill is next with 22%, followed by CBS Local with 19%.
the hill gets a lot cause its where libs beat up on conservatives in the message boards running huge board conversations to nowhere…
Unlike most of today’s news websites, around 75% of Drudge Report’s visitors still come in via desktop computer. Also, a gigantic 94.51% of the overall traffic is generated from within the U.S.
The Daily Mail sits at the top of the Intermarkets-SimilarWeb list with 159,000,000 page views, outdistancing The New York Times by an even 50 million.
here for fun:
http://intermarkets.net/our-sites/drudge-report/
90% of the Drudge Report’s traffic is direct (industry average 37%)
Audience Profile
Age 35+
Predominantly Male
Enthusiastic movie-goers and online purchasers
Balanced political affiliation
Political activists and voters
High Household Income
source of other info was Adweek…
[i wonder if they ever wrote when i got the CLIO and they took it away?]
I used to visit Drudge multiple times a day, but ever since Drudge’s idiotic Tweet about the chiron on Fox News’s “Outnumbered” back in November, I stopped. To be fair, that was really just the final straw.
I have been visiting that site since the 90s. There was a time when used to send out emails and I was on that list. Why do I visit it a few times a day? Varied news, what is the topic of discussion, breaking news etc. It is a one-stop shop.
As for people who say that they now disagree with the content, well if I didn’t get that news on Drudge I would get it from BBC.
In the early days, Drudge was a sort-of journalism-insider site. He published rumors…hot stories that every journalist knew about but were too un-vetted to publish.
The Clintons were his prime target. There was for example this ongoing saga about Bill Clinton having an out of wedlock black son. Someone paid for the kid to have DNA tests and Drudge followed the story daily, like a soap opera. It was a bust, but oddly made a re-appearance in the last presidential election.
On election day, he’d publish the presumed winner before the polls closed, stuff the networks didn’t do even though they were the source. These days you don’t need drudge for things like that, but his site persists.
Perhaps Trump via Birtherism and other alternate realities sort-of moved in on Drudge’s territory. There’s some sort of tension between them. I dunno, but I guess life was easier for him during the Clinton years.
Because Drudge will put on their page news that the MSM won’t.
Ever see anything about the ‘knockout game’ from MSM? Of course not, but one white on black incident and you have the MSM as head cheerleader.
Drudge evens things out a bit, IMO.
The “birther” thing still seems to obsess the leftist mind. It is a fact that it began with the Hillary campaign in 2008. It began with some promotional material for Obama’s “autobiography” and there was suspicion that he might have gotten an advantage as an alleged foreign student.
In fact, that long form birth certificate he produced is not the original. I can get a copy of my 1938 birth certificate from Chicago. There is still some question about why the Obama certificate is not the original. There has been speculation about the father listing.
I don’t think anybody still thinks he was born in Kenya.
Artfldgr said:
“if you want to know how things work
then stop pissing in the well of understanding…
stop warping principals and for god sakes, admit you dont know and want to have a real answer over all others, especially witty trendy made up crap
Fractal Rabbit is basically bloviating out of nothing…
I can’t explain Drudge’s numbers. I look at it once every couple of days. I’ve looked at it less and less it seems Drudge has a Never Trump vein running through it.”
It’s amazing how much condescending word salad I had to wade through just to find the part where Art insults me. You want me to admit “I don’t know”. Perhaps, in your rush to right all that is wrong with…everyone, you missed the part where I said I couldn’t explain Drudge, and mistook that admission for the opposite.
Bloviating. From bloviate: to discuss at length in a pompous and boastful manner.
Pot. Kettle. Art. Pot, kettle.
Oh, but please, Artfldgr, keep telling us all how stupid we are. Please. It never gets old. Use your omniscient perspicacity for the good of all mankind. Lift us, the troglodytes of Teh Intarwebz, out of the stinky muck of idiocy and ignorance.
Only you can do it, Art. Only. You.
Drudge was my number three bookmark for years and worth a look every morning util it started taking a left turn and specialized in hate Trump. As time went by it became irritating, like a foot fungus or something, so I deleted it about three months ago and never looked back since it was so one sided and that, in my opinion was the wrong side.
It’s been my home page for many years. A better source of breaking news I have not found.
https://www.whatfinger.com
Drudge used to be my fourth news stop of the day, but I quit going there some time ago. It was in part due to Trump fatigue; I already get all the Trump hate I need from other sources and had stopped going there daily. But the final straw came when my AV alerted to something; I don’t recall the details. I still have it in my news links but I never went back.
“Trump Fatigue” is a real thing. Drudge might be going the way Little Green Footballs went. That was a mandatory stop for me until it wasn’t.
Maybe he just wants those hits like the NY Times gets.
I do not care about hit #s. I do not have a website, a blog or anything else, just make use of what is out there and is reasonably decent. And that is the Drudge Report, inter alia. Much of its links are to dreck, though; titillating, maybe amusing, but dreck.
Drudge yields interesting links to Brit papers (which seek my subscription, denied), and these often have better reporting, more detailed, than our MSM in our own country on events in our own country. I’m talking facts here, not opinions, (as in “13 cows”, not our MSM’s “herd of cows”).
As to hits, I might hit DR several times daily, to check on a 2nd or 3rd link I meant to read but had not.
So as a 1st step I go to NWS, then DR, then WSJ. My routine. After that I check my brokerage accounts! The last has required some steeliness lately.
Mike K…
Official Kenya does.
Barry Soetoro WAS born in Kenya. The evidence is overwhelming.
The hitch is that he was born to TWO American citizens.
This put him in the exact same position as John McCain.
He was also born outside Conus to American parents.
Barry was conceived ELECTION NIGHT 1960.
That’s why he was born exactly nine months later… in August.
Barry’s embarrassment turned on his biological father.
The fact that he was born overseas was and remains legally irrelevant.
Mike K
LGF went south when Charles found a new lover.
He flipped on a dime.
That was the end of LGF — he went Stalinist.
I just did my first set of pushups for the new year. 25. I could have done more, but I need a double hip replacement. So factoring in getting back up was a consideration. Getting down on the floor was a struggle. Still, not bad for 56, ehh? Whether or not that just means I’ll be the fittest guy in the millenial gulag remains to be seen, in this, our new year.
But it’s a decent start.
Drudge is supposedly a “conservative” web site, but the few times I’ve looked at it, I can’t see it.
In fact, that long form birth certificate he produced is not the original.
Yes it was. The commissioner of health and the registrar of vital statistics located it in the archives in a looseleaf volume in the appropriate and expected place.
They often do fun things with the pictures they post. Hands all in the same position and whatnot.
I never caught the fire for Drudge. The site was ugly, there was more weird stuff than I wanted and RealClearPolitics had me covered for aggregation.
My Trump friend was a big Drudge fan. He dumped me after I got tired of listening to him talk about Trump and curse everyone else. I wonder what he did with Drudge.
The birther aspect I found curious was the promotion for a book Obama was going to write:
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2012/05/17/the-vetting-barack-obama-literary-agent-1991-born-in-kenya-raised-indonesia-hawaii/
I also wonder if Obama didn’t use the Kenyan angle to juice up his applications to Occidental or Columbia.
There is much we don’t know about Obama’s early years as well as the notorious Khalidi tape in which Obama spoke about Palestine which has been suppressed by the LA Times.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/10/la-times-suppresses-obamas-khalidi-bash-tape-andrew-c-mccarthy/
Fortunately the US and the media can keep the important secrets.
“Trump via Birtherism”
You mean the birtherism that started in the 2008 Hillary campaign with your idol/boss Sid Vicious Blumenthal, manju?
FR, I have been doing nothing but scrolling past artfldgr’s effluvia for years now. Oooh, now he will probably trash me. But I won’t see it.
Drudge isn’t updated as much these days- it isn’t uncommon to find no changes from morning to evening. I stopped visiting it more than once a day a few years back, but it is still a regular stop for me in the morning after RCP Politics and Markets.
Yes, it definitely has taken on a NeverTrump vibe, but compared to CNN it is alt-right.
Heh.
Lately, drudge seems to also harbor a virus that after clicking a link takes over my browser with a new page screaming that my computer is infected. Just another reason to bypass drudge if he can’t even watch his quality control of the web page itself.
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
His mother was a perpetual graduate student who worked for the Ford Foundation. I think she finished her dissertation about three years before she died and never held a position on any teaching faculty or at any museum. His father was a junior grade economist who worked for the Ministry of Transportation for a time. Obama himself was a copy editor for a commercial company that produced corporate newsletters under contract. NYPIRG employs an antheap of youths in temporary positions; Megan McArdle had a stint working for NYPIRG ca. 1993; she said subsequently it was the most evil organization she’d ever worked for and functioned like a direct-mail mill (except that they dun people face-to-face). His job at the ‘Developing Communities Project’ was to be a public nuisance on salary. As for his stint at the Harvard Law Review, the position of ‘president’ is not analogous to the editors chair at other law reviews. It’s an office-political position filled by election; a staff editor at the review said later that ‘he always seemed to want to be the president of the Review rather than actually accomplish anything in the job’.
Amazing how concise these dishonest sales jobs can be.
When I first became aware of Obama, around 2005, and some of the Dems were taking him for a test drive I wondered what was wrong with them and how did they think America could ever vote for such a goofy guy with a strange name and a cloudy past. I made the statement several times as lefty friends started to like him that Obama could never happen here in the USA. Not the first time I was wrong and the few D.C. insider people I know in Washington and Texas big Dems loved him because he was everything to everybody and harmless to their core which is consolidation of power.
While the Dems seem to lock step into their causes our conservatives seem to be like a radioactive material that keeps reaching critical mass and splitting as seen on Drudge.
RE: “A sinking feeling that I’ve often had in the last decade or two, of things slipping away and time running out.”
MeToo#
My lawyer friend tells me it’s unheard of for a law review president not to publish an article in their review. That’s a big reason to be editor. Obama didn’t publish.
My friend said it’s unusual for the law review president of an ivy league school not to receive top-drawer offers to clerk. Obama didn’t receive any offers.
My friend said Obama’s transcript must have had a bad smell.
Obama didn’t receive any offers.
IIRC, he declined the offers. He did not seek a position in a firm until about two years after completing his degree. His wife (admitted to the Illinois bar in 1989) quit practicing in 1991; her license lapsed in 1993 and she’s never re-activated it. He was hired as an associate at a 12 lawyer firm in 1993 and was declared ‘of counsel’ in 1996; his license lapsed in 2002. I think about 1/3 of those who receive law degrees don’t build a career in law, in large measure due to overproduction of JDs. In the Obamas’ case, they just could not be bothered. He had a 40%-time faculty position, but in 12 years collecting a salary from the University of Chicago, he never published a single scholarly article. You want to hack-off a partisan Democrat, recite his work history in dispassionate terms.
Partisan Democrats used to make fun of George Bush the Elder for being a walking resume. Bush was a combat veteran who had built his own business from the ground up and was a crucial figure in making the Republican Party a going concern in greater Houston; he had also held a public-sector executive position. Fast forward 20 years and partisan Democrats are knocking each other over to declare their fealty to a dilettante’s dilettante.
“the sense of deja vu combined with a sinking feeling that I’ve often had in the last decade or two, of things slipping away and time running out.”
Neo, I have stopped reading your website because all you and the people who post here do is say “tutt-tutt–things are going badly.” I know it is not your wont to be an activist but surely at some point you have to ask yourself, what am I going to do about this? If not me, who? If not now, when?
Maybe you are already doing something but it does not show on your website. Your posts are insightful in identifying problems and showing their background so that is good. But how about discussing people and organizations who are doing something to reverse our disastrous course?
An example:
Here in CA, Carl DeMaio and his ReformCalifornia.org was able to get Prop. 6 to repeal the gas tax increase on the ballot. The Democrat attorney general put a totally misleading title on the proposition “ELIMINATES CERTAIN ROAD REPAIR AND TRANSPORTATION FUNDING”
DeMaio did this on a shoestring budget and then the CA republican party totally abandoned him. His organization did not have the money to run ads telling the low information voters who decide initiatives based in their titles what it was really about. The CA Chamber of Commerce even ran ads against it since the tax was used to pay off the construction companies.
A few more dollars would have made a huge difference in the results.
DeMaio is not quitting. He has big plans for more initiatives. A link (here it is link ) to ReformCalifornia here might send a few badly needed dollars to them. 🙂
Drudge feeds the beast, just like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox. I look at Drudge, but I am starting to pull away. I am over the whole fear factor. It is designed to get your hair up, like everything else.
The shrinking feeling is there. Two years of Congress not doing their job. Impeach Trump and the Senate will vote against it. It is truly ridiculous how Congress knows how to wast time. I am however, excited about the real possibility of the troops coming home. Trump may just be the president to do the most common sense approach with our military in the past twenty years.
DeMaio did this on a shoestring budget and then the CA republican party totally abandoned him.
I think you are missing the elephant in the room. The Republican party is now a branch of the uniparty that Codevilla explained a few years ago.
Key paragraph:
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
FOAF,
I’ve been reading Neo, under various internet aliases, since the Scott Brown election in Massachusetts. Artfldgr has been a fixture for much of that, I believe.
I go through phases where I actually read everything he vomits forth. There is the odd kernel of trivia that sometimes makes it worth it. Like panning for gold but not as profitable. Sometimes I just skip past his walls of text.
I should probably just take your advice and ignore him permanently. It’s a shame though. He’s obviously intelligent. But who wants to be lectured incessantly by someone that grandiosely narcissistic?
MikeK wrote: “I think you are missing the elephant in the room.”
No not really. You will get no argument from me about the corruption of both parties in California.
But you do not address my main point: what are YOU going to do about this?
You have plenty to worry about in your adopted state of AZ. Besides Sinema, a scary result of the Democrat vote harvesting in the 2018 election was the election of a Democrat as the Sec State. Pair that with the Democrat registrar of voters in Maricopa county and you have the ground work for rampant election fraud to flip AZ blue in the next election.
I know you are a refugee from CA but think about the epitaph on a grave in the Tombstone AZ boot hill: “Where you were I once was, where I am you soon shall be.”
As you know but I am stating this for out of state readers, in the last decade, CA was able to recall a Democrat, Gray Davis, for raising taxes and screwing up utility prices, and install Arnold, a supposed Republican. Arnold even tried to take on the government unions.
That is unthinkable now. How soon will AZ turn far-left if YOU do not do anything about it?
Bob:
If you’ve stopped reading here for the most part you’ve probably missed the times I’ve discussed organizations I think are doing good work. Most of them have to do with a topic of particular interest to me: education, particularly education and free speech. Another is the Walkaway movement, which I’ve covered fairly extensively, as well as Jordan Peterson.
And of course during campaigns I discuss various candidates I think might be likely to make a difference, to whom people can contribute.
Neo, I agree there is a sense of dread around. I don’t know exactly where it comes from as realistically, Nancy and the gang only have the House. Maybe it is because the newbie’s don’t know what they don’t know and I fall into the trap of their blow hard rhetoric. And Bob, I have supported local elections and bills here in my state. I sent $100 (divided up) to elections outside to my state to help candidates that the GOP had pulled their support from. (Three of the five won office!). I doesn’t feel like enough. Thank you Neo for letting me dump my anxiety on you. I don’t know what the answer is. Hoping the Dems in Congress just show enough of their tail, the voters decide they have had enough.
Neo writes: “you’ve probably missed the times I’ve discussed organizations I think are doing good work.”
I apparently did. I looked at your list of categories and none of them seemed to fit. I also scanned your posts in the month leading to Nov. 6,2018 and did not see any advocating activism.
Supporting organizations is just one category to make a difference that occurred to me. I am casting around for ways to do this given that I am an introvert and would not be effective in door-knocking or other face-to-face campaigning. Besides, given the reaction of Leftists like the clerk in the store in the viral (among conservatives) video, doing this in in coastal CA would not be good for my health.
Carol, you are probably doing far more than the vast majority of people. But consider this for what we are against. There are about 2 million government employees including teachers in CA and each of them belongs to a union. They all pay around $1000 per year in dues, the large part of which goes to support Democrats. That is hundreds of millions of dollars going to the Democrats every year.
The unions (and some illegal aliens as Neo noted) provided the foot soldiers who went door to door browbeating people into filling in and giving them ballots. I highly suspect that they discarded ballots that voted the wrong way.
We can tutt-tutt about that but what is to be done? I am donating to the National Right to Work organization (–> link ) who are fighting to get the Janus decision implemented. That may cut some of the funding but I think most government employees support the Democrats anyway. Still it is something.
what are YOU going to do about this?
You have plenty to worry about in your adopted state of AZ. Besides Sinema, a scary result of the Democrat vote harvesting in the 2018 election was the election of a Democrat as the Sec State. Pair that with the Democrat registrar of voters in Maricopa county and you have the ground work for rampant election fraud to flip AZ blue in the next election.?
I volunteered for the local Congressional candidate in Tucson, making calls for her in the primary and general election. She is an independent business woman with a long history in Tucson. She lost to a professional politician who lives in Flagstaff but “lived in her sons apartment in Tucson” for the campaign.
I donated enough to McSally to attend some meetings with her. She is impressive in person and I have followed her for years as I had a second home in Tucson until moving completely 2 years ago. She ran a poor campaign and was probably ignored by Kelli Ward voters who lost the primary to her. They were quite critical of McSally as not conservative enough.
I spent years active in California politics, both statewide for the medical association and local in Orange County. I think the ballot harvesting is a threat to governing but California is probably lost. Brown joined the public employee unions to wreck the state.