Liberals Win: Huffpo Blows Past Drudge

Not to take anything away from Huffington Post, but they have about 60 employees (and at least $6 million in annual expenses) versus Drudge's one. HuffPo is knocking the cover off the ball, but Drudge's ongoing success as a sole-proprietor is shocking.

Yes, comparing Huffington Post to Drudge is comparing apples and oranges. I looked at HP just now (never seen it before) and immediately clicked away--it's just another blog (JAB). I visit Drudge several times a day however because it's not a blog but a launching page with links to informative and sometimes fascinating (and occasionally shocking or annoying) news, opinions and rumor. Drudge rules :)

By unique visitors are they are excluding counting over and over the same guy who comes back each day? I know many people with broadband have static IPs, but many people like me work on different computers throughout the month. So I think it would be hard to do that.

My guess is huffpo numbers are increasing because it is a blog, there is a major election cycle and the democrats have the only interesting race.

If drudge became a blog his numbers might go north as well.

...or I should say rather that Huffington Post is Just Another Site Pursuing Monetization By Seeking Lots Of Hits, while Drudge is, well, it's just Drudge, with only the occasional banner ad I can easily ignore. That says a lot I think about Matt's motivation for running his site...

More to the point:

^^^ What Henry said in the first comment.

Actually Drudge is at least two people. But yes, they're different operations. More interesting is that Huffpo growing along with the election cycle, but Drudge seems to have stalled. Interested to check back this summer/fall and see what the elections are doing for both sites.

Drudge is said to be 2.5 people: Drudge's assistant and a part-time attorney. But the overarching point is right ... I bet the operating and profit margin for Drudge is a lot better. It's mission has largely been as a promotional platform/vehicle for Drudge, to get book & broadcast media contracts, etc. His ads are low-CPM run-of-site types. My read on Huff-Po is that they're not doing this as a money-maker, but rather to influence politically. Apples and oranges, as you say.

Finally, as a suite of blogs, rather than Drudge's apparently older technology, HuffPo's naturally optimized for search, tags, etc., in a way that will grow their traffic organically and exponentially over time. It's actually impressive that Drudge continues to have the traffic he does ... though maybe now he'll do an update of the site??

The numbers from ComScore and Nielsen are not a good reflection of what Drudge or HuffPo get. Both operate by having a user download software onto thier computer. This works great for personal computers, but businesses don't allow it. Drudge's audience primarily views the site at work - so their is a correlation.

The fact is Drudge's audience is growing and is not stagnant. Unique visitors are closer to 12 million per month and page views are over 500 million per month.

HuffPo I am sure is bigger as well.

Not sure where you are getting your info saying Drudges audience is stagnant. Here are a couple press releases from Drudges Ad sales rep. from the past couple months. Looks to me like he's doing fine??

http://www.intermarkets.net/pressReleaseFiles/year/2008/January/013008.html

http://www.intermarkets.net/pressReleaseFiles/year/2008/02February/020808.html