Moreover, unlike unique visitors, page views are not an accurate reflection of engaged eyeballs, which is what advertisers look for above all else. Page-view counts aren’t taken seriously when a site automatically and completely refreshes between fifteen and twenty times an hour, as Drudge’s does-a practice that artificially inflates page-view counts. Take his July 1 boast about page views, which sounds impressive-for a moment. One sign that Drudge’s influence is on the wane is that he goes to such great lengths to deny it. Meanwhile, the Republicans, to whom Drudge hitched his star, have fallen into disarray, and the mood of the country shifted dramatically with the election of Barack Obama and the onset of the financial crisis. Such sites have built on the promise of Drudge, mixing hard news and chatter into a stew that generates enormous traffic and an ability to shape the conversation. The field of online news has welcomed several explosive upstarts, such as Politico and The Huffington Post (Talking Points Memo, which launched in 2000, has also expanded rapidly since 2004). Since then, though, a number of things have changed in ways that have diminished Drudge’s power. It’s easy to look back now and laugh at the hyperbolic quality of Harris and Halperin’s claim, but here’s the thing: at the time, it was strikingly close to the truth. In 1998, his exposure of a spiked Newsweek piece on Monica Lewinsky nearly knocked down the Clinton presidency, and six years later, by amplifying the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, he helped torpedo John Kerry’s candidacy.ĭrudge was the right’s one-man wrecking crew, feared by liberals and respected by bookers and editors around the country. Mark Halperin and John Harris, two major machers of the Washington, D.C., press corps, jointly declared: “Matt Drudge rules our world.” Over the course of a decade, Drudge’s no-frills approach-his original delivery method was e-mail, and some of his early content was gleaned from the trash cans at CBS News-had turned his Web site into a world-beater.

Kerry in 2004, Drudge’s place in journalism had no parallel.

Matt Drudge’s Web site appeared to be chugging along, sinking its teeth into the news cycle just like it used to.

A BILLION THANKS FOR MAKING JUNE 2009-TOP JUNE IN DRUDGE REPORT’S 14 YEAR HISTORY!? PAGE HIT 675,406,735 VIEWS FROM 129,922,878 VISITS … TRAFFIC ROSE 21% FOR MONTH OVER YEAR AGO blared the headline on the right of the home page. If you visited the Drudge Report on July 1, you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed.

Dredge report