March 12, 2007: Drudge Report Readership Claims Inflated as Much as 2,000 Percent, Says Blog

Drudge Report logo. [Source: Wikimedia (.org)]The Drudge Report, a conservative news Web site often touted as “the most successful independent news site on the Web,” vastly inflates its claims of readership, according to the Valleywag technology blog. The Drudge Report is operated by Matt Drudge and an assistant, and claims (as of February 2007) to have a readership of around 1.2 million unique visitors a month. However, Drudge and marketing research firm Comscore are apparently inflating the figure by as much as 2,000 percent. Drudge uses what Web site owners call a “meta-refresh,” which automatically “refreshes” a Web page already loaded in a user’s browser. Most sites let a user refresh the page on their own, but many news sites assume that visitors leave their sites open for hours, and have the site refresh on a periodic basis. Drudge has his site automatically refreshed 20 times an hour, or once every three minutes—a refresh rate considered quite aggressive in news site circles. Technical reporter Nick Denton writes: “What’s the effect on the site’s traffic? Each refresh counts as a new pageview, whether or not the user is watching, or the window remains visible. And there must be plenty of these inattentive readers: one site owner I know experienced a 20 percent jump in traffic after he introduced, as an experiment, an automatic refresh every half hour. Drudge loads anew every three minutes.” Denton concludes that while Drudge’s site is undoubtedly quite popular, his readership claims have been “hyped up to the point of misdirection.” [ValleyWag, 3/12/2007; FireDogLake, 3/12/2007]