UK Newspapers Are Saying They Have A Larger US Online Audience Than They Do British, And If That is So They Can Thank Just One Guy In Miami – Drudge

Philip Stone August 1, 2007

British newspapers are falling over themselves in trying to make their web sites attractive to US readers and they spin that some of those sites have more regular American readers than British. So the sites are being aimed now not just for a British audience but for a much larger international audience, and with more eyeballs in front of those newspaper web screens, the newspapers hope that translates into more advertising money, if they can attract advertisers interested in more than just domestic campaigns.

And yet while it is true that Americans are discovering British news sources, the reality is a bit different from the spin, for fully one-quarter of US readers are driven to British sites from just one US news site – The Drudge Report. 

According to a report by City University in London some 36% of traffic to UK news sites comes from the US with Drudge sending three times more Americans to British sites than does Google.

If Drudge links to a UK newspaper story then that site knows it is going to have a great web day. For instance, Tuesday must have been a great web day for the Daily Mail for Drudge linked to three of its stories. And what kind of stories does Drudge pick that tickles the fancy of Americans: Here are those Daily Mail headlines: “Jeering mob of children ‘stoned father to death as he played cricket”; “Large glass of wine a day increases bowel cancer risk by 10 per cent”;  and “Most detailed pictures of Earth ever seen.”

And on Drudge’s site there are direct links to the UK’s Daily Mail, Daily Mirror (with a separate link to the Mirror’s 3 AM Girls gossip page) , Daily Record, Evening Standard,  Daily Express, The Guardian, The Independent, the free TheLondonPaper, The News of the World, The Star, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times.

Because so much of the US traffic to the UK sites are via links Americans tend to just read the particular story and not nose around further, which is bad news for the Brits because new measurement systems are going to be based more on how much time people actually spend on a site rather than the number of pages they look at.

How powerful is Drudge? According to Hitwise that measures Internet activity “Drudge Report” is the ninth most frequent search term in the US that send traffic to a “News and Media site (The word “weather” features in three of the top 10 searches). The Drudge Report is the seventh most popular news and media website in the US (Yahoo! News is tops). The most popular UK news site for Americans, incidentally, is not a newspaper but rather the BBC.

Drudge became an American journalistic phenomenon in 1998 when he broke the story that Newsweek Magazine had information that President Bill Clinton was sexually dilly-dallying with a White House intern but was withholding the story, so Drudge made Monica Lewinsky a household word. Newsweek then had to publish but Drudge had hit unheard-of stardom.

It is said today that very few people in Washington DC in positions of influence do not make looking at Drudge one of their first priorities each day. Drudge promoted on his site Tuesday that he had 14.56 million visitors in the past 24 hours, 393 million in the past 31 days, and 4.8 billion for the past year.

Drudge updates his site frequently during the day and it is said that many people set their computer to refresh his page every five minutes or so just to make sure there is nothing new, so he has a lot of page refreshing visitors. He doesn’t actually report his actual page views, but even so, the numbers are impressive.

And more impressive, perhaps, is that he is basically a one-man operation now based in a house in Miami. Most of his stories are links to other sites, but he does occasionally have a few short items of his own.

How does he do what he does? He apparently monitors many television news channels on multiple sets and uses several computers to monitor web sites.

How influential is he? According to Leonard Downie, Washington Post Editor, “Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge”.

Time Magazine in 2006 named Drudge one of the 100 most influential people in the world. It described his web site (drudgereport.com) as “A ludicrous combination of gossip, political intrigue and extreme weather reports (remember we said that weather figured in three of the top 10 news weather searches) … still put together by a guy who started out as a convenience-store clerk.”

Five years ago Drudge described his site. “In every state, and nearly every civilized nation in the developed world, readers know where to go for action and reaction of news – at least one day ahead.” 

For all of that Drudge really doesn’t carry that much advertising. He is said to make around $1 million a year – not much considering his influence. One way he could really make it big is to use his site like a Google ad site – every time someone clicks on a link the link pays him. Wonder if the Brits would be interested in that?

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