Drudge Report success irritates many

I like to keep up with the latest, and generally *start* my news gathering at DrudgeReport.com, from there branching off to a dozen primary sites (and a host of lesser sources).

Apparently I'm not alone in appreciating the value that is Drudge. The scruffy, no-frills page has been in the top 10 news sites for years, and for the last several months has been #1 on Nielsen Online’s "Current Events & Global News Destinations" (ahead of also-ran news sites like Fox, CNN, AOL, Daily Kos, Yahoo!, Google, Netscape -- and the inimitable New York Times).

Of course, any news aggregator shows his stripes by what he chooses as newsworthy--as well as where he points you to get the story. Matt Drudge is mixed (I'll comment on that in a future post) but he's certainly not a leftist--which is refreshing as hell.

The more politically liberal viewers out there seem especially angst-ridden over Drudge's success, and one of their most repeated complaints is that he unfairly fools the net traffic stat-gatherers by auto-refreshing his page every few minutes, which (his detractors claim) falsely inflates the site's popularity.

They're mistaken; it doesn't work that way. But no matter how often the claim is shown to be erroneous, it keeps floating up as an "explanation" for Drudge's popularity. (I'll have something to say about that sort of recurring wishful thinking in a future post.)

Let me clarify it: DrudgeReport's auto-refresh (every 3 minutes) does not exaggerate the site's "session count." And it's that session count (unlike the more primitive "hit count") that the internet metrics folks use to measure a site's popularity.

Netratings.com (among other net traffic gathering sites) explains this every month. And see the recent page at the Newspaper Association of America for the full table of most popular News sites.

(You can also check the topic of "sessions" at Wikipedia, and delve into it at technical pages on the topic of session tracking.)

Actually, instead of inflating the statistics, Drudge's reported 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 be 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 (or open a new view of the page), but I just keep the page open and pop up new tabs for any news articles that Drudge points me to, reading them when I have the time.

So for me, an avid reader/scanner of news, I view the refreshed DrudgeReport page at least 300 times a month, but from all that I only generate 2 or 3 sessions. And with the prevalence of new tabbed browsers, I'd bet there are a lot of Drudge viewers like me.

.