Thursday, April 3

What a racket

Matt Drudge pulls in 800K a year for putting up a list of links and resting on his laurels.

"There is always this feeling that Drudge is about to break something," says Phil Boyce, program director at WABC radio in New York. That leads many loyal readers to check the site 10 to 15 times a day. That drawing power has turned Drudge into one of the Net's biggest traffic generators. "Besides being on the front page of Yahoo or getting some major placement on AOL, Drudge Report is the place to be," says Bill Bastone, editor of the Smoking Gun website. "The second he links to us, our traffic triples." Conversely, getting your link removed from Drudge's homepage can be catastrophic. Just ask the New York Press. Last summer the alternative weekly ran a column that criticized Drudge. In retaliation, Drudge dropped the Press from his list of newspaper links. Overnight, traffic to the paper's site plummeted by a third.

Along with that power comes profit. "If we've been going through an ad recession, I'll take more!" marvels Kevin Lucido, CEO of Intermarkets, who handles Drudge's advertising. Lucido says ad space on Drudge's site sells out months in advance. (The Drudge Report ranks 29th on the Web in advertising impressions.) Such advertisers as DirecTV, Paramount Pictures, and even the New York Times (NYT) pay as much as $2 for every 1,000 impressions. Even with discounting on the ad rate, Drudge's flood of traffic means he can still bring in almost $5,000 in revenue on a good day. Back out a few expenses -- such as server costs, his employee's salary, and Lucido's commission -- and the rest is gravy


I used to be pretty up on Internet stuff, but these days I’m starting to feel way behind the curve. I’m going to post a few terms I see all the time, but really don’t get. If commenters could a)briefly explain what the heck this thing is and b)tell me if I need to bring it into my life, I would be quite appreciative.

RSS?
XML?
An aggregator? What the heck is that?

And what about wireless? Yes, I know what it is, and it seems quite the thing, but does anyone out there actually have it and use it?

Intel Dump is another good warblog

Winds of Change provides good daily summaries

Daily Kos brings together some stories that wonder where the Republican Guard has gone to and adds his two cents:

Whole units are missing from the battlefield and that has to concern CENTCOM planners. Whole divisions are gone. The arrogant and clueless Richard Perle says they've gone home. He's an idiot. They've done no such thing. If they did, you'd see signs. Abandoned equipment, lots of surrenders, the surrender of cities or even the beginnings of civil war as the regulars shot it out with the Baathists.

Instead, they're nowhere to be found.


I'm on Catholic Exchange today.

To Mark Shea:

Michael's not the only one.

I'm half French, too - my mother was a Bergeron...