Admittedly, Drudge is nothing like The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) digital products or CNN.com. Drudge has not attempted to put a paywall around its content, nor added hundreds of journalists as Bloomberg has. But its tremendous audience remains among the largest in the online news sector. While its model may be old, it is still unusually successful.
Online aggregation always has had a bad name among traditional media. It is considered a low-cost model to draw readers through the use of other people’s content. However, it is not particularly different from Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) news product, except that humans pick stories instead of “intelligent” technology. And intelligent technology is not professional aggregation at all, nor does it have many of the human touch advantages. Software has not replaced editorial judgment, at least not yet.
Among the oldest aggregators, which include Huffington Post, there has been a move to professional journalism. That puts Huffington Post closer to the model of The New York Times. Over time, each of these faces the ability to sell tens and eventually hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising, or to charge for content. The jury remains out on the paywall approach, and may for years.
One of the aspects about the Drudge model that cannot be argued is its ability to draw readers. By its own count, it receives about 20 million visits a day. That would put it in a league with The New York Times online and the combined website traffic of several other major media companies. And it has no print or television counterpart to help improve traffic.
One of the strengths of Drudge, at least from a financial standpoint, is that, based on almost all evaluations of the business, it has a very small staff. That means its profit margins must be large, in a world in which those of most large news sites are small or even negative.
Perhaps the most cutting criticism of Drudge is that it has an “agenda,” which in most cases is viewed as leaning right. But the same case has been made against Fox News, whether or not that charge is correct. Perceptions that most of the traditional media lean left have been part of the criticism of them for years. A political bias to news reporting has become nearly universal.
The irony about Drudge Report’s role in the media is that almost every major news outlet would like to be featured at the site. It is considered one of the most powerful sources of traffic, regardless whether these other media speak kindly of it in public.
Evaluations of the Drudge model are fewer and fewer recently. That is a shame since, among news media models, it still hold a primary place.
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