Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media 216
tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other interesting findings about news behavior."
Redirects (Score:4, Informative)
Don't most links on Twitter go via redirects like bit.ly? In that case I'm not sure how you would tell if traffic is coming from Twitter.
Re:Influences the news cycle (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, heh. Drudge isn't really linking to left-leaning articles. I used to visit Drudge for a while. Pretty soon, I'd play a game called "name the political party". Whenever they had a headline about a politician where I didn't recognize who they were or which political party they were with, I'd play a game called "name the political party". I was actually pretty good at it. If the headline was downplaying a politician's wrongdoing, then you could pretty much guess he was Republican. If it was a blistering headline attacking the politician, it was either a Democrat or a Republican that they were turning their back on because he had dome something they couldn't condone. The very fact that I could guess the political party based on how harshly they attacked them in the headline should be pretty good evidence of a right-wing bias.
I also thought it was interesting in the last election that they refused to give the electoral vote count between Obama and McCain, choosing, instead to show the popular vote. Of course, the electoral vote tends to magnify the gap between the winner and loser, and they wanted to minimize how badly McCain lost. I'd bet money that they showed the electoral count and minimized the popular vote count during the Bush-Gore election, since Gore won the popular vote.
Do you really think Drudge would get an approving nod from Rush Limbaugh if he wasn't a right winger? "Matt Drudge is the man who is to the Internet, what I am to broadcasting." -- Rush Limbaugh
I think Drudge's favorite newsource is Andrew Breitbart, who is most definitely conservative.