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Drudge report’s mystery net worth attracts interest amid sale rumors.

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Ever since rumors began circulating that Matt Drudge might be looking for an investor in his popular Drudge Report website, media watchers have been trying to figure out what the 25-year news aggregation site might be worth.

One Drudge watcher pegs it north of $200 million while others say its closer to $100 million. Any minority stake would be discounted, however, since Drudge is unlikely to surrender any control of the news aggregation site, which links to 50 or more stories a day and usually pushes a political agenda.

The Drudge Report has been grabbing attention this year for boosting Joe Biden instead of Trump, who it pushed in 2016. The apparent change-of-heart has drawn the ire of the President, who recently tweeted that the Drudge Report “sold out,” and suggested that its provocateur founder may have suffered a “nervous breakdown.”

Rumors that Drudge is looking for an investor swept the publishing and financial worlds a few weeks ago, but remain just that. And emails to the reclusive Drudge were not returned.

Following Media Ink’s Sept. 29 column on the rumors, website 24/7 Wall Street wrote that the privately held company that could be worth over $100 million.

But Matthew Lysiak, author of the recently released bio “Drudge Revolution,” thinks the valuation is easily double that figure. “If Axios is really worth $200 million, Drudge has to be worth well north of that.” He pointed out that Axios attracts about 16 million unique visitors per month. “Drudge has that on a very bad month. And his overhead is much lower. ”

“Drudge has himself, a server, and one employee,” said Lysiak. “That’s it. Those are all of his expenses. No office. No staff. Nothing.”

Traffic is important because it determines ad revenue. But it remains unclear how much traffic Drudge really has and calls to the firm handling the site’s ad sales, Granite Cubed, were not returned.

Drudge on his website Thursday claimed that in the last 24 hours he had 27.3 million “visits,” and that over that last month he attracted 767.2 million “visits.” But there is no clarity on whether that is one visitor turning up numerous times per day or a “unique visitor” who would only be counted once a month. Comscore, which tracks unique visitors and other traffic metrics, has not returned numerous calls and emails seeking Drudge’s numbers in recent weeks.

Doug McIntyre, the CEO and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall Street notes that estimates from other tracking services tend to show a wide difference. SimilarWeb pegged Drudge’s August traffic at  63.22 million a month with 11.41 page views per visitor or with 721.3 million page views. SEMrush pegged it much higher at 150.1 million visitors and 7.08 page views per visitor, which translated into 1.063 billion page views.

“Based on the midpoint of traffic estimates, which is about 850 million per month, Drudge Report revenue is approximately $3.4 million a month, or $40.8 million a year,” McIntyre estimated.

But, he says, the Druge Report’s big advantage is its low overhead since most of the 50 or so headlines posted link to stories published by others.

“The entire direct cost to run Drudge Report is about $3 million a year,” McIntyre said.

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It's Time People Realized That The Drudge Report Is A Major Media Property Worth Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars

Everyone knows that The Drudge Report has an extraordinarily large readership, especially given the size of the team that produces it (maybe three people, including Drudge himself).

Everyone knows that The Drudge Report still sets the rest of the media world on tenterhooks from time to time by announcing that it has exclusive news forthcoming.

What few people know — in part because of the apparent simplicity of the site — is that Matt Drudge is arguably the single-most powerful individual in the digital news business.

What few people also know is that the deceptively simple Drudge Report is one of the most successful and profitable digital media businesses on the planet.

And here are some other things that few people know:

• The Drudge Report is, at minimum, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Matt Drudge, presumably, created, funded, and owns all of it.
• This combination of influence and wealth makes Matt Drudge one of the most successful digital media entrepreneurs in the world — the Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph Hearst of the digital age.

Don't believe it?

Let's look at some numbers.

• The Drudge Report recently announced that it has surpassed 1 billion pageviews per month . How many pageviews is that? It's about as many pageviews as The New York Times reportedly got per month as recently as a couple of years ago.
• The Drudge Report has 14.4 million US readers per month — only slightly fewer readers than The New York Times (16.4 million), per Quantcast .

In short, the Drudge Report is almost as big a digital media property as The New York Times.

That's absolutely staggering.

Because The New York Times is produced by ~1,200 journalists. The Drudge Report is produced by one.

And how about economics?

Economically, The Drudge Report is much smaller than The New York Times. But that's in part by design. And, importantly, The Drudge Report is likely highly profitable, which is not something that can always be said for The New York Times.

The Drudge Report doesn't have a salesforce. It works with a firm called Intermarkets to sell the ad units on its pages. The Drudge Report contains general news, often with a political slant, which means The Drudge Report likely gets relatively low revenue-per-page. (Say, $1.50 per 1000 pages). But The Drudge Report has a lot of pageviews.

Assuming The Drudge Report gets $1.50 per 1000 pages and has 1 billion pageviews per month, The Drudge Report should be generating revenue of $15-$20 million a year.

That doesn't sound like much, but, importantly, Drudge has very low tech, editorial, and sales costs.

So almost all of that is profit.

Assuming The Drudge Report pays the full corporate tax rate on those earnings, the business probably generates $10-$15 million of after-tax profit per year.

So, how much is The Drudge Report worth?

Media properties generally trade at a 15x-25x multiple of earnings, or a 4x-5x multiple of revenue, depending on the growth rate of the business and the level of profitability.

A range of 15x-25x earnings for the current incarnation of The Drudge Report, therefore, would produce an estimated value of $150 million to $375 million.

And those values, importantly, drastically understate the value that could be created if Matt Drudge decided to build it out into a more typical digital media business.

One of the most remarkable things about The Drudge Report is that the site's content still consists primarily of original headlines linked to stories elsewhere on the web. This is a highly innovative and efficient media model, one that takes full advantage of the amazing capabilities of the Internet.

The editorial content that Drudge creates, in other words, consists of finding and interpreting important stories from millions of information sources around the world. Rather than creating a huge newsroom itself, the Drudge Report uses the whole digital world as a newsroom. And, importantly, unlike many digital media businesses, Drudge compensates those who did the work of creating the content that Drudge links to by sending them hundreds of thousands of readers — readers that they almost certainly would not have had had Drudge not chosen to link to them.

The Drudge Report, in other words, is not just a "win" for Drudge and its readers. It's a "win" for all of the content creators that Drudge links to, as well. So, everyone who creates content for a living should cheer for the success of The Drudge Report.

(In fact, given that news-business gurus still seem to be consumed with a perennial debate about the "future of news," it's time to recognize that, whatever that future is, The Drudge Report will be a highly successful and influential part of it. Traditional media organizations and journalism schools may not like that. But it's the truth.)

If and when Drudge wanted to, moreover, he could begin to build a small tactical newsroom of his own, along with a dedicated ad sales force. With almost no effort, these additions could double or triple the number of pageviews the site produces, along with the amount of revenue that The Drudge Report generates from them. Such investments might reduce the number of readers Drudge sends to other sites, but they would not stop this traffic flow completely. And they would likely make the site worth 2-3X as much as it is today.

In short, Matt Drudge has not just created a quirky little headlines-and-links site that occasionally breaks news.

He has created one of the most innovative, successful, and profitable digital media businesses on the planet, one that is likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's time he got some credit for that.

Click to check out the Drudge Report :

Now watch how LinkedIn exploded:

Matt Drudge Has Barely Changed Anything About The Drudge Report In The Last 20 Years. This Summer, He Upended Its Advertising Business.

A change to the secretive publisher’s business has revealed new details about his operation and is attracting scrutiny from the ad industry.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

The Drudge Report, with its Web 1.0 design offering a single page of links, is one of the enduring internet media business success stories. Two decades after rising to prominence for breaking news of the Bill Clinton– Monica Lewinsky affair, it remains one of the most popular websites in the United States and a key source of right-wing ideas for its readers, including President Donald Trump .

Owner Matt Drudge is also still adept at attracting attention, such as last week when his was the only major news site to post the El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter’s manifesto. But the site has always resisted the temptation to build anything beyond the simplest business of selling display advertising on a single homepage.

Now, Drudge has quietly flipped the switch on perhaps the biggest change he’s ever made: He’s ditched his longtime advertising partner for a new representative, in the process revealing new details about his business and attracting scrutiny of how his site operates.

The reclusive publisher does not disclose revenue figures, but estimates put the site’s annual haul well into the realm of millions of dollars per year. Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence platform, estimates that over the past 12 months the site generated more than $30 million in ad revenue. Another estimate from the Global Disinformation Index , to be published in a report next month, pegs revenue at $9 million per year.

In a surprising turn, Drudge Report removed ads between the end of May and mid-July, according to Danny Rogers, a cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, a project that’s analyzing domains to generate “risk ratings of the world’s media sites.” After noticing an absence of ads on Drudge around May 31, “we didn’t see any ads on Drudge until about July 12,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News.

During that period, Drudge cast off his advertising representative of close to 20 years, Intermarkets, in favor of a new and unknown company, Granite Cubed. It has no record in the digital ad industry, was only registered as a company in March of this year, and lists no staff or owners on its websites. Yet it just landed one of the biggest websites in the US.

“Any time a 20-year relationship comes to an end is certainly a surprising turn of events,” said Jay Friedman, president of Goodway Group , a digital agency that specializes in programmatic media buying.

Corporate records show that Granite Cubed is owned by Margaret Otto. She and her husband, Adrian, have a business association with the Drudge family that goes back years. The couple acquired Refdesk, a reference website founded by Bob Drudge, Matt’s father, in 2017. They also operated a company that began hosting the Drudge Report in 1999 and later added Breitbart as a customer. (The couple did not answer questions about whether they still own that hosting company or if it’s still hosting Drudge or Breitbart.)

Adrian Otto is the technical director of Google Cloud. He told BuzzFeed News he is not involved with Granite Cubed. Upon joining Google in 2017 from Rackspace, he said, he “stopped operating [his] other business interests” and is no longer involved with “hosting duties” for other websites. Otto was previously listed as the technical contact in the domain registration of breitbart.com, and was thanked by name in the foreword to Andrew Breitbart’s book about Hollywood.

“I knew Andrew Breitbart when he was alive, and helped him with some technical work,” Otto said.

Margaret Otto declined to discuss her company’s plans for Drudge Report or Refdesk, which she said is also represented by Granite. She wouldn’t say if she represents other websites or answer other questions, such as whether Matt or Bob Drudge were shareholders in Granite.

“We respect our customer’s privacy, and therefore, cannot comment on the other questions,” she said in an email.

Friedman said the connections between the Ottos and Drudges raise a question of whether the move to Granite Cubed is “a relationship play [or] a revenue maximization play,” given that today’s representation firms need to be “incredibly technically savvy and have a really good grasp on how to [succeed] in an automated ad market.”

Drudge was characteristically silent when emailed by BuzzFeed News for comment about his new advertising partner and the strategy for his site. His old partners were also hesitant to speak, reinforcing how one of the web’s most influential websites remains in many ways a one-man black box.

“Intermarkets no longer represents DrudgeReport.com, and it is our policy to not discuss former clients with the media,” said Kevin Lucido, the CEO of Intermarkets, which represents other conservative publishers, such as the Media Research Center and the Political Insider.

For his part, Bob Drudge said in an email, “I am retired and have no comment.”

It all makes for a startling shift for a publisher best known for a strategy rooted in changing nothing about his site’s operation. It’s also causing the ad industry to look closely at the mysterious new firm and its high-profile customer.

Friedman said Granite Cubed’s lack of a track record and profile in the industry will be a challenge if it tries to sell ad space directly to brands and agencies. “Certainly if you decide to go to big brands and sell directly, the Granite Cubed thing is going to be challenging. [Brands] get 100 requests a week for meetings and this probably isn’t going to float to the top,” even if they’re representing Drudge, he said.

Others in the industry say they had concerns about Drudge long before the switch to Granite. A manager at another ad tech company told BuzzFeed News he blocked the Drudge Report from its systems in 2017 due to “unacceptable auto-refreshing practices.”

After being loaded in a web browser, Drudge’s site automatically reloads itself after two minutes. The manager said the frequent refresh rate for Drudge Report raised concerns about the number of ads being loaded that were actually able to be viewed by users.

“The page was refreshing approximately every 120 seconds, with no consideration given to user activity. The user could have it open in a background tab and it would accrue [ad] impressions all day long,” said the manager, who requested anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media about specific websites.

The manager said they also removed refdesk.com from the platform due to similar concerns.

Drudge, Granite, and Intermarkets declined to comment on the refresh rate or the comments from the ad tech company manager.

In an interview with Ad Age last year , Erik Requidan, an Intermarkets executive who helped oversee Drudge’s monetization efforts, spoke about how the site’s seemingly low-tech design belied a more “sophisticated” ad operation.

“What seems like a pretty simple thing on the surface is actually quite sophisticated and effective,” he said.

Contact Craig Silverman at [email protected] .

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Drudge Report Technology Stack

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Quantcast Measure

Rubicon Project

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Smart AdServer

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PubMatic is the marketing automation software that powers the advertising strategy for pre...

Native advertising demand side platform.

Criteo was built on the open Internet, and believes in the opportunity, choice and freedom...

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Faqs for drudge report.

Explore frequently asked questions about Drudge Report’s business, including founding details, header quarters, information on technology stack, industry listing, and other details.

What is Drudge Report's official website?

The official website of Drudge Report is drudgereport.com You can find their contact number, email address, and headquarters by clicking here .

How many employees are working at Drudge Report?

6sense keeps track of 100 - 249 employees who are working at Drudge Report. You can find more about their employees through LinkedIn or their website using 6sense Chrome Extension . Also, check out the jobs and hiring category at Drudge Report mentioned earlier on this page to identify which sector the company is growing.

What industry is Drudge Report in?

Drudge Report is in the industry of Internet.

What is Drudge Report's tech stack?

The top technologies used by Drudge Report are:- Quantcast Measure , Rubicon Project and Smart AdServer You can also explore 56 technologies across 12 categories used by Drudge Report mentioned earlier on this page.

Where are Drudge Report's headquarters?

Drudge Report headquarters are at Los Angeles, California, United States. To know the exact address unlock now .

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DRUDGE REPORT Salaries - How Much Does Drudge Report Pay?

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Drudge Report Company Overview

Average salary at drudge report beta.

The estimate average salary for Drudge Report employees is around $83,412 per year, or the hourly rate of Drudge Report rate is $40. The highest earners in the top 75th percentile are paid over $93,151. Individual salaries will vary depending on the job, department, and location, as well as the employee’s level of education, certifications, and additional skills.

DISCLAIMER: The salary range presented here is an estimation that has been derived from our proprietary algorithm. It should be noted that this range does not originate from the company's factual payroll records or survey data.

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Job Openings at Drudge Report

Similar company salary, faqs about drudge report company, 1. how much does drudge report in the united states pay.

Drudge Report pays its employees an average of $83,412 per year. The average salary at Drudge Report range from $73,968 to $93,151 per year.

2. Do Drudge Report employees get a higher salary than other similar companies?

The salary at Drudge Report is lesser than Cornell Daily Sun. The highest salary package reported for an employee at Drudge Report is $93,151 per year, meanwhile the highest salary package reported for an employee at Cornell Daily Sun is $104,376 per year.

3. How much does Drudge Report pay compared to Cornell Daily Sun?

The average annual salary at Drudge Report is $83,412, or an hourly wage of $40, in comparison to Cornell Daily Sun which pays $93,463 per year or $45 per hour.