Things that make you go OMGWTF?!
When I recently asked one of Sullivan’s colleagues at the Atlantic why it abides Sullivan’s disgrace of the magazine, he simply referred to the traffic Sullivan generates for the Atlantic online.
A Drudge link. Rule of thumb, it’s worth a quarter of a million hits. I didn’t realize a permalink on his page is worth about the same, each and every day. Sheeee-it, as they say at Harvard.
I didn’t even realize Sullivan had a Drudge link until Ace mentioned it. So I took a look at Drudge’s static links for the first time in, like, a decade. What an assortment of mixed nuts! Most of them make sense, but…well…Helen Thomas? Does she actually write stuff? I thought she existed simply to rasp impertinent questions at White House press secretaries. And frighten small children. And annihilate erections.
I dug around Google for a while to see if anyone knows how Drudge chooses his links, but I didn’t find anything good. You can imagine how much pointless crap a search of “Drudge” and “links” turns up. I remember Free Republic lost their Drudge link for a long time, back in the days of their lawsuit with the Washington Post. They worked that out somehow; they’re back on the front page.
I wonder what a quarter million hits looks like, in plain monetary terms. I’m fuzzy on the concept (I couldn’t monetize this blog; it would ruin my color scheme). He could sell linkage, for all I know. He would be well within his rights to do so. Drudge has become such an institution, it’s easy to forget it’s just dude’s personal website and he can haul coal in it if he wants to.
This I do know: AndrewSullivan.com and his 280K hits a day goes directly to The Atlantic. Per the American Digest article I linked yesterday, The Atlantic is currently losing $5M a year. Ergo, Sullivan can be as balls-out, bug-fuck crazy as he likes, and the Atlantic will put up with it.
And don’t even think about trying to get Sullivan de-linked from Drudge. That much I did learn: Sullivan has crawled so far up Matt Drudge’s ass, Lemmiwinks couldn’t reach him.
September 16, 2008 — 9:47 am
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