The Drudge Report is a conservative news-aggregation website. Run by Matt Drudge with the help of Charles Hurt and Daniel Halper, the site consists mainly of links to news stories (spinning the headline) from other outlets about politics, entertainment, and current events; it also has links to many columnists. Occasionally, Drudge authors news stories himself, based on tips.
The Drudge Alexa ratings are near 162 in the U.S. and 620 globally. Alexa ratings ranks websites in terms of their popularity. As a comparison, Vox has an Alexa rating of 1,284. In short, The Drudge Report is one of the top conservative reaches on the web. But something is happening at Drudge. Newsforecasters asks, what is the future of Drudge, what have been the changes, and how we can use it for analysis in the future.
Drudge has recently ditched his longtime advertising partner for a new representative, and in the process revealing details about his business and attracting scrutiny of how his site operates. Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence platform, estimates that over the past 12 months, the site generated more than $30 million in ad revenue. After 20 years, Matt Drudge is looking for more revenue.
Along about a year ago, people started noticing changes in Drudge. It is not just News Forecasters saying this, many others have noticed this as well - here is a link to such examples, and there are others. Take a look at our example of the Drudge Report in the feature photo. Hardly a pro-Trump conservative website. Many times the links lead to articles that nowhere near as bad as the Drudge spun headline.
Perhaps Drudge would argue that he is a more purist conservative, and he is trying to push Trump to be a more pure conservative. We don't believe this strategy is effective or will work - on conservatives. It will merely tear down the Republicans with division. Love it or hate it, Trump's political fortune is now tied to the conservatives.
So why does Drudge do what it does? It is hard to know for sure, but here is where we can put on our deepstate conspiracy hats. Drudge has been compromised by someone and now is being used as a tool of the deepstate. Conspiracy or not, it has effectively happened.
Some unsuspecting conservatives still believe Drudge has conservative credibility. The deepstate, instead of destroying Drudge, will use it to turn conservatives toward them. Other media outlets are putting out stories sowing doubt to Drudge readers showing how Trump is in trouble with conservatives because Drudge has changed. It is not the conservatives that changed - its Drudge. This strategy will largely not work, though perhaps just enough to takeout a small set of conservatives to win in the 2020 elections. We wonder if this strategy is not being employed on other websites and conservative pundits - Ann Coulter is another turned anti-Trump.
This may cause the future of Drudge to eventually go the way of many political websites and get relegated to the heap of other normie political websites and be drowned out as political background noise. Best for Drudge today to just go for as much money one can make to live another day.
For News Forecasters this now can be a useful tool to help us predict the future. Whatever narrative that is on Drudge is now what the deepstate wants. As an example, on October 16th, 2019 they were very oddly promoting Pete Buttigieg after the October 2019 debates. Mayor Pete is the latest deepstate heartthrob to replace the ailing scandal-ridden Joe Biden in a bid to capture the center-left of the Democratic party - where the deepstate mostly lives today.
A video presentation of this subject: