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Latest tally: Drudge thrashes news competitors
Maverick wins visitors by sending them away
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The Drudge Report at 3PM GMT October 4, 2001 |
October 5, 2001 Want the latest news on the (apparently) pending attack on Afghanistan? NYTimes.com offers the carefully researched article titled “Powell Says U.S. Had Signs, but Not Clear Ones, of a Plot.” FT.com tells us “Nato given evidence of bin Laden's involvement." LeMonde.fr offers "La violence s'impose à Gaza." Over at CNN.com, self-proclaimed server of 24-hour news, the headline "Taliban issues death threats" hasn’t changed for six hours.
Is this the latest news? Let’s visit www.drudgereport.com.
Clicking brings this news: “Satellite 'picks out bin Laden caves'...” which links to an up-to-the-minute Times of London article with the details. Reload and... wait, here’s the Washington Times’ headline and link to “U.S. targets 23 terrorist camps in Afghanistan...”
Drudge “will find the link before you do,” says journalist Ken Layne, himself a fast and furious newshound.
It’s not just Layne who has noticed that Drudge is THE clearinghouse for the breaking news. According to the latest figures from Neilson/Netratings, DrudgeReport.com rang up 10,759,000 pages impressions for the week ending September 16.
That puts Drudge’s site ahead of the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today… and every US news site except Time Magazine and MSNBC. Click for the top twenty page-spinners.
Drudge inverts conventional web wisdom. Consider the odds against his success :
- Drudge’s site is a scoliotic skeleton of text. Haute couture for Drudge is pasting up a single snapshot.
- Up against news organizations with 100s of reporters and editors, the site is a one-man show; when Drudge sleeps, the site is static.
- When his competition’s traffic is churned out by visits to 100s of current pages and 1000s of archive pages, Drudge’s site is essentially ONE page.
- This page is expressly designed to send visitors away. Almost every word is a link to another site!
And this is what makes Drudge great. He knows what the public wants -- news -- and works tirelessly to deliver it. We can rely on him.
With galaxies of news and opinion available online, Drudge knows it's better to build a telescope than another solar system.
When will someone log the echoes of September 11 documented in the local press?
Read a Cornwall paper’s obituary of a local boy who left home at 17, became an American, fought in Vietnam and died in the World Trade Center as head of Morgan Stanley’s security team. Or, for a lighter aside, there’s the Lincolnshire man who is selling his nightclub and “planning to fill his new warehouse at Stallingborough with a whole range of military supplies, including armoured cars, military-style hard hats, gas masks, survival suits and camouflage netting – in preparation for war.”
E-mail us if you know of more stories in this vein.
