Posted on 11/26/2023 6:15:47 PM PST by SeekAndFind
It's no secret that for years, the Drudge Report drove conservative (and often mainstream) media news cycles. If Drudge was talking about it, you could bet everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to PJ Media was also discussing it. In fact, there was a symbiotic relationship between Drudge's aggregated links and the pages of most conservative media outlets. Pretty much everyone was either getting story prompts from Drudge or sending him stories (often via AOL Instant Messenger) hoping he'd link them.
A Drudge link day was always a good one for a website. In the early days of PJ Media, before we had the sophisticated technology we do now, a link would crash our severs. Back then, our tech guys would get an email alert anytime we got a Drudge link so they could fortify our site against the barrage of people swarming to read our stories.
I remember my first Drudge link. I wrote something criticizing John Kasich, then my governor (and the son of a mailman). I was so excited that I printed out the page and hung it on my refrigerator. It ranked up there with my first mentions by Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Those were heady times.
For a few years, Drudge links made up a rather large percentage of traffic to our site. We'd get a link every day or two. Sometimes multiples. A link at the top of the page, "above the fold," could bring in hundreds of thousands of readers—and no small amount of revenue.
Many of you will recall that Drudge at first did everything he could to promote Donald Trump. Then something happened, some sort of falling-out that no one ever really got to the bottom of, and Matt Drudge turned on the president.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
I found the link to FR from Drudge too. Fortunately it was before 9/11. I say fortunately because I was glued to Free Republic that entire day and evening. It was THE BEST source for on the ground news that day - not from reporters but from Freepers who gave eye witness reports on what was going on in Manhattan, on the Mall and the Pentagon.
Darn, I just looked up the date I first signed up. November 1998. I missed my 25th anniversary.
Yep.
Guess I found it before 9/11 too. There was an interesting Freeper at that time, Ken5050. We had so much in common, we traded phone numbers. On 9/11, his daughter was in one of the towers, and he called me and said he was going down there to find her. Then called when he did find her. She was on one of the lower floors and got out.
Then Hitlery bought a house right across the road from his. His wife had lunch with her a few times and said she was quite charming in person. Last thing I heard was that he was going for heart surgery. Never called or posted again.
Rush Limbaugh turned me into a Republican. I’d just quit my job in Florida, voted for Bill Clinton, and then decided to go to CA. where my daughter lived. As I drove across the country, Rush was the only station I could get on my car radio on those long stretches between cities. By the time I got to CA, I was a Republican. That was also before the Uniparty obliterated the difference. .
Some can't afford to run. Some wouldn't if they could.
Same here, but during the early part of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
He also broke the story about Lewinsky story I think?
>> Any news regarding the whereabouts of Matt Drudge himself?
Hell?
>> We couldn’t even have one tiny piece of the media that was normal.
There’s Free Republic... :-)
>> run [from America]... Some wouldn’t if they could.
Guilty as charged.
Well said.
Drudge flamed out. So to speak. My guess he lives in Thailand, Asia or Brazil. You can get lost there and be an unknown.
That’s how I found Free Republic from a Drudge link while reading stories about a White House intern.
He may have been to Epstein Island...
20 clicks a day for 20 years here. 2019 sounds about right. We call it “The Dirty” now in my house.
Yep.
Me as well.
#16 That site could use 3 columns to display all them links!
“Drudge was listed as #41 in the nation with 164 million visits in October 2018. Currently, the site ranks at #145 with 51 million visits in October 2023”
Looks like a lot of views could be had by duplicating the old recipe. But I suspect the paywalls of today would make it a challenge.
I think it’s that Drudge links helped them but when DR changed, it financially hurt them. Basically, it’s all about them.
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