Proving that the Drudge Report drives traffic

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on October 1, 2007 at 1:31 PM

On Sep. 28, Follow the Media (ftm) published a feature about the Drudge Report, which consequently linked back to the article. What happened? ftm’s traffic that day was the largest in its three-year history.

According to ftm, “now Drudge did not give great prominence to the link – it was listed in the far right column near the bottom.”

“Imagine what happens to those links that get prominence at the upper left of his site.”

97% of the people who read ftm’s story were new to the site, 88.5% of whom came directly from the Drudge website.

Ftm goes on to say the stickiness was rather disappointing (only 7% of users stayed on site after viewing the story). Yet the huge surge in traffic is enough in itself to underline the Drudge Report’s influence.

This confirms that the Drudge Report is the single biggest source of readers coming via links into US newspaper websites.

Some newspapers and journalists actually work hard to catch the attention of blogger Drudge, in order to get increased hits.

Source: Follow the Media