The Drudge Report announced today that it had passed more than 9 billion page views for 2010. Yeah, 9 billion.
From the site:
OVER 9 BILLION SERVED! THIS MORNING DRUDGEREPORT PASSED 9 BILLION PAGE VIEWS IN YEAR... TOPPING 2009'S TOTAL OF 7.8 BILLION... 43 COUNTRIES EACH HIT PAGE OVER 1 MILLION TIMES...
While I don’t have answers, I do have questions:
- That’s a lot of page views for a one-page deep site. Are there any other examples of this type of traffic in such a shallow site?
- How much money does the site throw off — if we take 10b pageviews for the year (or 10 million CPMs) and assume that the minimal site running Google Adsense sees something like a $3 CPM — that’s some profitable traffic and according to Quantcast, it’s an affluent userbase.
- With such a great gig, why not expand the operation? Just optimizing the ads, selling them directly, or adding another section or two could easily juice these numbers higher. Why not?? WTF??
- Where does all this traffic come from?
- Clearly Drudge’s leverage makes this a better business than the $NYT, $NWS, and all the other newspapers put together. Where’s the strategic vision? Where’s the M&A? Where’s the copycat sites?
- Does Drudge get paid to distribute other firms’ content?
- How few people really work at the Drudge Report? Some summer interns finding cool links?
Anyway, kudos to you Mr. Drudge for building such a simple, kickass, profitable website.
