ftm Hits The Drudge Report And The Effect Is Staggering

Our feature Sept. 28 discussed the influence of the US Drudge Report links on making UK newspaper sites so popular internationally (see box at right) but ftm now has first-hand knowledge of just how effective Drudge is in boosting unique visitors and page views to a site.

Drudge linked to our story Friday with the result that, in our three year existence, last Friday was by far our most active day. Normal traffic to our site more than tripled.

Now Drudge did not give great prominence to the link – it was listed in the far right column near the bottom (almost graveyard for Drudge) but a whole slew of people certainly still found it. Imagine what happens to those links that get prominence at the upper left of his site.

Using our ISP’s Web Analyzer statistics and also Google Analytics we now have a pretty good live laboratory exam of how Drudge can affect a site.

On Friday, fully 97% of the people who accessed our story were new to our site, and 88.5% of those came from Drudge – the story also was prominently available via Google News.

The disappointing news for ftm is that 93% of those people accessing the story left the site after reading it – in other words it was in and out traffic. Naturally a site like ours hopes for some “glue” from new visitors, and that upon discovering something new they’ll take the time to look around. Not so.  On the other hand, perhaps we should be grateful that 7% did stick around to take a look, and it was interesting that the hits on the “about” page really took a jump – you could just see new visitors asking, “Who are these guys?”

The good news is that the advertising server showed a huge increase in traffic for the day.

The ISP stats give us a breakdown by country or organization of the top 20 IP addresses that visit ftm. We had said in our Friday story how influential Drudge is in Washington and that was proved by a stat that showed that for the first time two news “groupings” broke into the top 20 —US government and US military. We’ve always known by looking at raw logs that we have such readers but this was the first time there were so many that they broke through the top 20 barrier.

You think they were looking us up on their own time?– Phil Stone September 10, 2007

Keywords:viral marketing

Rupert Murdoch - The Media Mogul

From Australia to the San Antonio, Texas tabloid to News Corp and News International, Mr. Murdoch fascinates all media watchers. Update includes new material on Dow Jones / Wall Street Journal deal plus London free newspapers and newspaper marketing. When Murdoch talks, the media world listens, and he has a lot to say about newspapers, broadcasting and new media. 53 pages PDF (September 2007)
Free to ftm members, others from €39
Order

Media Measurement Moves Forward and Everywhere

Includes: mobile and internet metrics, electronic measurement systems and device descriptions, RAJAR (UK) debate, with comments. 57 pages PDF (May 2007)
Free to ftm members, others from €39

See what's inside

Further Complicated: Advertising, Children and Television

Advertising and television face more complaints, criticism and new rules. ftm reports on the debate in Europe and North America 43 pages PDF file (March 2007)

Free to ftm members and others from €39

Order

The State of the Print Media in the World

ftm reports from the World Association of Newspapers Congresses. Includes WAN readership studies, Russian media and Russian politics, press freedom and the state of journalism. 62 pages. PDF file (October 2006)

Free to ftm members and others from €39

Order

French National Newspapers
publishers, designs, editors all change, with comments. 40 pages PDF (updated July 2006)

Free to ftm members, others from €39
Executive Summary
Order