Matt Drudge's über-news site Drudge Report said today in an email to subscribers that August was the site's best month ever.
MANY THANKS FOR MAKING AUGUST 2008 THE MOST-VISITED MONTH IN DRUDGEREPORT'S 13 YEAR-HISTORY!... THE PAGE LOADED 614,577,960 TIMES WITH 14,163,025 UNIQUES, SMASHING PREVIOUS HIGH, SET IN MARCH...
That's just under 20,000,000 page views per day. Combine this with the latest Hitwise report that logs the Drudge Report as the sixth most popular News and Media site in the United States, just above the New York Times, with 1.78% market share -- and it reaffirms just what a force Drudge is.
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Drudge is wonderful. His pop-ups, and autorefreshes? Not so much.
To eliminate in IE7:
1. Visit Drudge.
2. Click tools, then click Internet Options.
3. Click the Security tab.
4. Click Restricted Sites.
5. Click Sites.
6. Click ADD for http://www.drudgereport.com.
7. Click OK and close all windows.
No more drudge pop ups. No more drudge auto refreshes. No more annoying script driven advertisement.
Don't clap. Just throw money.
Dad
This would be a much more meaningful milestone if he didn't auto-refresh so often.
Totally agreed! Just leave the page open on 1m computers, and it'll get 20m page views in a partial work day with no help from anyone.
I take that back... it's 20 page views PER HOUR on a single computer. That's 480 page views from a single machine if left open in a browser tab all day. That'd take less than 42,000 people to help him get those numbers.
Since when is 14 almost 20?
614/30, they are counting all of them, not just the uniques, which are monthly anyway.
I am glad someone started talking about that bull...
Page view does not equal someone seeing his main page. That is ANY page on his site being used by anything,. Including any kind of javascript or includes (includes which you will not see by viewing source.) You could easily add 100 includes of blank pages and get 100 page views on a single view. This means nothng.
However, that is a lot of page views.
Second...he has a lot of people linking to him. Lets say 20,000 political sites add him as a link. This can bring at least 10 times that number per day just in search engine crawlers going through the internet. Add to that the scammers, scanners, hackers, and other little auto grabbing or sniffing programs that also follow links and you can take a good half million page views just from that....due to his huge number of linked sites.
Refresh rate really adds up. His page seldom ever changes, yet refreshes. I have seen the guys at foxnews keeping it on their screen. All day.
Viewing his page and clicking a link requires you to go back wards and reload the page...
and so on..
Now...14 million uniques. Hmmm. That can mean a lot of things. Webmasters keep it vague so you can make things up for them. Uniques...hmmm... Users? Impossible to log that actually. Unigue ips? He did not say that.
a unique could mean anything at all. A unique ip is logged one day....next day it is there again, but unique to that day...etc.
Each search engine crawler has an ip and there are lots of em. And so on.
I think he gets a lot of traffic, but he is also not getting that much. And.....all he does is link to news...with nothing else going on.
Oh, he broke a story...!!! How did he do that??? Oh...he linked to the sunsentinel..
He is so 1997.....
It's called Auto refresh people. THe easiest way to exagerate your hit count.
No, Drudge's auto-refresh (about every 3 minutes) doesn't exagerate the site's "session count" -- unlike the more primitive "hit count," is is how the internet metrics folks measure the site's popularity.
Netratings.com (among other net traffic gathering sites) explains this. And see the page at the Newspaper Association of America: www.naa.org/blog/digitaledge/1/2008/06/Nielsen-Drudge-Report-Leads-Top-3...
(You can check out more info on the topic of "sessions" at Wikipedia, and/or delve into it at pages like http://javapapers.com/servlet-interview-questions/explain-the-methods-us... )
Actually, instead of inflating the statistics, Drudge's site numbers are perhaps *lower* than they might be, since many readers (me included) just keep a browser tab open to DrudgeReport all day, every day, and never close it -- which, ironically, works out to a *single* session. (I routinely close that tab only when I reboot my system, which is about once every 2 weeks.) A session only counts more than once if you leave the domain for another website and then return again to Drudge, but I just keep the page open and pop up new tabs for any news articles that Drudge points me to.
So for me, an avid reader/scanner of news, I view the refreshed DrudgeReport page maybe 300 times a month, but only generate 2 or 3 *sessions*.
"The page loaded 614,577,960 times" -- okay you do realize that's MORE THAN DOUBLE the total population in the United States?
The Drudge REFRESH is completely annoying. I HATE IT... and there is only one reason why it does it every 30 seconds (or how ever often it is) and it is not to update the site. So draw an intelligent conclusion. I love the site, but come on.
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