Matt Drudge's spin

The Drudge Report may be the most successful independent news site on the web. Matt Drudge's decade-old site sets the news agenda, and not only for conservative platforms such as Fox News. The fedora-wearing eccentric's property, considering it's largely put together by just two people, has an impressive audience: more than 1.2m unique visitors from the US in February, according to Comscore. But those devotees may not check the site quite as often as Matt Drudge would claim.

A site's 'meta refresh' setting is a web page's meta tag used to specify a time-interval after which a web browser will automatically refresh the page. Most sites leave it to readers to call for the latest version of a page; but popular news sites often assume that visitors will leave their pages open, and ensure the page is reloaded so that the latest headlines show.

Nothing wrong with that — except that the Drudge Report is automatically refreshed way more often than the frequency of new stories would justify. At 20 times an hour, Drudge is twice as aggressive in his use of this tactic as the next news site we checked.

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% jump in traffic after he introduced, as an experiment, an automatic refresh every half hour. Drudge loads anew every three minutes.

So, when Matt Drudge trumpets his gigantic traffic — he recently passed the 20m pageview a day mark — take that claim much like one should parse one of his headlines. There's some truth to it — Drudge is indubitably popular — hyped up to the point of misdirection.

2:04 PM on Mon Mar 12 2007
By Nick Denton
5,361 views
7 comments

Comments

Mike Snow at 04:02 PM on 03/12/07
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Drudge, hyping to the point of misdirection? Tell me something I don't know already.
loucabron at 06:32 PM on 03/12/07
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The February figure of 1.2 million unique visitors breaks down to just 42,857 unique visits a day. And to get 20 million pageviews from 42,857 people, they'd all have to average 466 pageviews a day.

Even if the front page refreshes every three minutes, you'd still need to leave it open for 23 hours and 18 minutes of each day to get it to refresh 465 times.

These numbers smell.
Nick Denton at 07:30 AM on 03/13/07
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@loucabron: Hey, you can't just divide the monthly visitors by 30 to get daily uniques. Maybe every single one of those 1.2m people come by every single day of the month, in which case the monthly and daily audience numbers would be the same.
loucabron at 12:01 PM on 03/13/07
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I stand corrected.

But still -- a site with 42,857 non-recurring visitors each day could achieve the same visitor count. And that's not particularly impressive.

Also, Drudge's numbers seem to be an acknowledgment that each visitor swings by an average of 20 times a month. (Or, visits only once a month but leaves their browser window open for -- on average -- one hour.)
joeduck at 03:01 PM on 10/12/07
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Another great post Nick. All the rumors about you are NOT true - ValleyWag puts out some great stuff.
jlhns at 02:04 PM on 03/22/08
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I use Avant browser which is a very good, free, enhanced IE based browser. To disable Drudge and others from auto-refresh, you just select Tools>Disable Scripts, open Drudge and Voila!- no more auto-refresh.
jlhns at 08:42 PM on 03/26/08
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Another good way to Drudge refresh is to open it thru www.proxybin.com a free anonymous surfing site. It blocks out scripts which doesn't allow the auto refresh.