Michael Wolff: Why Do Liberals Still Care About Matt Drudge?

[scheming daemons]

The New Republic, continuing the political world’s odd obsession with the Drudge Report, says its editor, Matt Drudge, has disappeared, or gone into seclusion like some latter-day Howard Hughes.

I do not think Drudge has disappeared. I think he is dead. Certainly the Drudge Report, which the New Republic claims gets “20 million hits per day” (a meaningless locution as old-fashioned as the Drudge Report itself) has been on automatic pilot for several years.

If he is not dead, he is definitely brain dead. There hasn’t been a breaking story on the site in months. Drudge, once one of the most vaunted gossips in the nation, clearly isn’t in the loop. Or he is just bored to death. He had been doing this for a decade. It is the same old Drudge Report, without improvement or variation. Or staff. Drudge may have theoretically gotten rich (“sources believe he makes millions per year off his site,” says the New Republic breathlessly, although Compete.com reports his traffic at 2.6 million visitors a month, which certainly isn’t going to make him millions), but he hasn’t built a business—it’s him alone performing the same repetitive act. (Or him and one Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger who seems to help him, and who has a site Drudge links to—and who exists only as an odd Drudge appendage; certainly nobody else seems to link to him.)


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Link to full story:

http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/125/why-do-liberals-still-care-about-matt-drudge.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=42209

[Xipe Totec]

1. Who?

:shrug:

[MrSlayer]

2. Still?

I never cared about that fuckwad.

[xchrom]

3. R.I.P. nt

[Peregrine Took]

4. There are many "newsier" sites to go to than Drudge nowadays such as

Huff Post or Daily Beast, Hawker, etc. Drudge is way "old school."

[jaysunb]

5. This is a joke...right ?

:rofl:

[Ocracoker16]

6. There have been posts here telling about what Drudge said

I personally ignore Drudge.

[Canuckistanian]

7. Haven't been there in years - is it still going?

He's completely off the radar, it seems.

[dorkulon]

8. “Shock: McCain volunteer ‘attacked and mutilated’ in Pittsburgh”

That's why.

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

9. maybe he invested his money with madoff and is now broke

drudge would seem to be a perfect mark.

[gratuitous]

10. Bzzzzzt! Thanks for playing!

"Liberals" have never cared a flying fig for Drudge. But the Kewl Kidz in the Village? Drudge rules their world, and has for the last dozen years or so. Drudge provided the conduit between reporter gossip and "legitimate" news. Reporters, like their middle school popular girl counterparts, love to gossip: Who's boinking who, who got tipsy, who got ripped, who dresses like a flood victim, who's just too (ohmigod!) cool for words.

Now, some miniscule percentage of this jibber-jabber is actually newsworthy, but there's really no way a reporter can get it into print or on the air. After all, this would be telling tales out of school. But a call to Drudge, a flashing red light, a "developing" tag line, and hey presto! some less-than-scrupulous outlet (New York Post) has a publishable tidbit. Well, now it's "out there." And once it's out there, the speculation can begin, and we're off to the races!

That's the purpose of Drudge's existence. Liberals don't give a shit about Drudge.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

11. Maybe he's busy coming out of the closet. n/t

[UTUSN]

12. *I* pay attention beCAUSE we NEED to watch the A-holes!1 n/t

[McCamy Taylor]

13. I don't. Some Democrats took his word as Gospel during the primaries, but IMO

the people who did that were conservatives in liberal clothes playing a nasty little game of Divide and Conquer the Democrats.

[Cha]

14. I guess it was in drudge's hay day that

I saw him come on c-span(years ago) right before I turned the channel.

[DatManFromNawlins]

15. Millions per year?

Try per month. He had a 300x300 tribal fusion ad at the top of his page for the longest time that paid him $3 for every 1000 impressions (this has probably changed, but when I did my research a few years ago, it was true). At 20 million views a day, that's $60,000. His internet bill for that site and the servers running it is probably at or around $8000. This is largely based on my guess from running my own web server, which doubles as my database server and gets about 500K impressions a day while costing me $600 a month (and at that amount, my resources are taxed VERY little... I could probably get 2-3 million hits a day before running into capacity issues). Even if he pays a few staffers $100 grand a year, he's STILL making a huge sum. And that isn't the only ad he's got on the site.

It's the "same old Drudge Report," because it works as a money making mechanism. People who go to that site don't want an elegant front page like the NY Times, they just want a way to get to the news, slanted their way, as fast as they can get their hands on it. You can scan that site's links to articles in less than 5 minutes.

He might be politically brain dead, but his site is a fantastic success.

[ShortnFiery]

16. Only due to right wing brain dead. Not by any fascination by the left.

:crazy:

[bemildred]

17. Who? nt

[Doctor_J]

18. Everyone who posts links to Sludge is on my ignore list

as are all the Limbeciles and Fox "News" addicts.

[EFerrari]

19. Who? Never gone there, never will. Don't care. He's an idiot.