7 Comments Add your own

• 1. Anonymous  |  August 6th, 2007 at 7:57 am

  .

• 2. Anonymous  |  August 6th, 2007 at 8:03 am

  I certainly don’t like it when he hotlinks his photos off news organizations’ websites without photo credits or even a link to the source. He does that with every photo on his site. It’s bandwidth theft and copyright infringement.

• 3. My name.  |  August 6th, 2007 at 8:05 am

  Also, if the LA Times weren’t so interested in getting links from Drudge they would bother to mention his traffic is a fraction of what it once was. Click my name.

• 4. Anonymous  |  August 6th, 2007 at 8:08 am

  Drudge compensates for his loss in traffic by continually increasing his automatic refresh rate. It’s up to 180 seconds. That way he can still claim a huge number of “visits” on his home page and defraud his advertisers with per-impression charges, even though someone who just leaves the site open in the background is being counted as 20 “visits” and impressions per hour.

• 5. Anonymous  |  August 6th, 2007 at 8:13 am

  This isn’t to mention journalistic integrity. His version of a “correction” is to just remove a link after 12 to 24 hours without comment. It’s like he’s aiming to make every aspect of his website a live compendium of the worst practices on the web.

  But I don’t think he’s losing his traffic because of any of that. I think he’s just not unique or interesting anymore. Take the Huffington Post or Digg, for example. Not to mention the entire blogosphere.

• 6. Michael  |  August 6th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

  Meh. A few years back, he linked to a story on our site, and while the traffic looked nice at the time, it threw off our averages in one metric or another for nearly two years. Advertisers don’t always get how traffic spikes work. (”Why is year-to-year traffic down 70% this month?”)

  …And hotlinking images is a crappy thing to do.

• 7. Mike Escutia  |  August 7th, 2007 at 7:02 am

  I don’t read Drudge’s site for one simple reason: The design… or lack thereof. It’s an aesthetic disaster.

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