Media Brands on the Web Grudgingly Admire Drudge

The website is matte and functional in an era of high-gloss web-design primacy. It’s hot and provocative in a low-brow, National Enquirer kind of way when so much of its audience is elite and cool. It’s unapologetically conservative and yet liberals don’t want to miss it either. It makes web designers' teeth hurt.

With all of those quirks and apparent contradictions, web scoopster Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report remains one of the biggest successes on the web. After 14 years, it’s not hyberbole to rank the site with Google, eBay and Facebook among the most significant online innovations since the birth of Al Gore’s medium — as the New York Times' media critic David Carr noted this week.

In fact, even today, while Google provides about 30% of the visits to news sites, Drudge Report headlines still rank as the No. 2 site in driving traffic and eyeballs to other online news purveyors, beating out Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Yahoo, Huffington Post, and just about every other mainstream media media, digital muckraker and content aggregator out there.

That’s because, long after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that gave Matt Drudge his big break, his eponymous site — ugly and poorly designed though it may be, with a sea of links, some in red, and random mix of headlines — is still a must-see for opinion makers, movers and shakers, and media and political mavens of every political and ideological persuasion.

There’s no doubt that Drudge still would rather provoke liberals and fire up conservatives than play it down the middle, but nobody on the left can afford to miss the agenda-setting that the Drudge Report does each day for the right-leaning body politic and their heroes.

Want to know what Limbaugh or Hannity is going to talk about that aftrernoon? Read the relevant headlines on Drudge that morning and you’ve got a more-than-even chance of getting it right. He also seems to sense apocalypse around every corner in natural disasters, scientific advances, UFO sightings, human character flaws and just plain enigmas.

Drudge doesn’t do nearly as much enterprise reporting as he used to, although it’s pretty clear that he or someone on his small staff has a mole or two in the New York Times newsroom who will tell him what’s on the next day’s front page. And the site still does a pretty good job of getting the scoop on major revelations in political tell-all books. 

But the Drudge Report’s biggest functions remain shining spotlights on the obscure but potentially significant, starting debates, raising issues, and validating the perspectives of Drudge’s mostly conservative readership. And for a guy who started out as a clerk in the CBS gift shop in Los Angeles, that’s a pretty good decade and a half of work.