Monica Lewinsky gave birth to The Drudge Report.
It's Time People Realized That The Drudge Report Is A Major Media Property Worth Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars
It's Time People Realized That The Drudge Report Is A Major Media Property Worth Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars
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.
The New York Times is produced by ~1,200 journalists. The Drudge Report is produced by one.
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.
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.
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.
Matt Drudge has not just created a quirky little headlines-and-links site that occasionally breaks news.
