drudge blog

By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

One of the most common complaints about the Drudge Report is its ever-present pop-ups and other invasive commercialism… a distant memory to me since I’ve employed Mozilla Firefox (not a plug, although Drudge did give it some free PR on his radio show a week after my tech support guy installed it on my machine) but let’s just say I found some fingerprints on the murder weapon of my virus-felled computer. There were enough spiders on that baby courtesy of Matt’s “commercial benefactors” to spin an entire cyberuniverse of sticky cobwebs and keep my AdAware humming for a good part of the afternoon.

More or less noxious to past, present or potential Drudge readers is the prevalence of right-leaning products. The blogger Thought Criminal summed it up for many of us in this February 8 essay: “Every day, his website is littered with advertisements pushing books from conservative war-mongers like Ann Coulter. Now Drudge Report is little more than a Republican watering hole : a place to click on ads for the latest Republican merchandise (Ronald Reagan ball caps, Bush Sr. coffee cups, and whatever cheap junk that Drudge sees fit to whore out).”

I took the time to respond to Thought Criminal’s essay.

As a former media intern, and as someone who has read a lot of Matt Drudge interviews, it’s highly unlikely he micromanages what goes into his ads. Media buyers make the decisions about where to place a client’s ads and in what format. He is a friend of Coulter’s, but he’s certainly not interested in having too many heavy strings attached to his enterprise….I hate his pop-ups, but it’s my choice whether or not to buy a blocker. He’s not going to change his media out of sheer altruism, and most people won’t.

But after reading his response, I realized that there was still a lack of communication about how advertising works.

…I understand that very few webmasters have the time to micromanage every ad banner that gets served to their domain. However, as an aspiring journalist, one must be aware of how the news is presented. I have NEVER seen a single ad or banner selling any “liberal” associated book or product. Without exception, his advertisers are of the Republican/Right variety. This is no coincidence. I am sure Drudge visits his own page and it’s easy to see the prominent ads that push the conservative agenda. A blind man could see it. At no point did Drudge say to himself - “Hmmm, my site might be misinterpeted by some as having a rightwing bias?…What can I do to change that misconception and make my site more balanced?”

All I ask is that Drudge take control over his domain (if in fact he has little/no say in choosing his ads) and restore a sense of balance - accept and display some advertisements from the left.
OR, if he can’t do that for whatever reason, then I think the public deserves a good explanation. Otherwise he risks being judged and labeled as something he is not.

I’ll get to other subjects in TC’s essay in later blogs. But for now, I want to address the amount of control Matt has in his website advertising. You’re all free to disagree with Matt’s choices and politics, but understand how advertising works.

In a website with the traffic level of Drudge’s, and clients large enough to afford his ads, there are five degrees of separation in this scenario:

The client (Conservative Book Club, AT&T, whomever.)
The advertising agency account executive, who plans the marketing mix
The media buyer, who makes the decisions on how to spend agency money based on meticulous demographic assessment - not whom Drudge likes.
The agency who handles Drudge’s web ads (in this case, Intermarkets, who also sells Internet ads for sites like the Village Voice and the Chicago Sun-Times). Banner ads are rotated, as understand interstitials (the trade word for “pop-ups”) are.
The webmaster (Matt Drudge. With no staff, the buck stops with him. ) I don’t know the ins and outs of Intermarkets’ policy, but most media carriers can stipulate what type of ads will not be accepted; Good Housekeeping does not accept cigarette ads, for example.

Advertising is paid for. Anyone willing to pay for ad space who is not “disqualified” by the advertising medium (i.e. cigarette ads in Good Housekeeping) is free to do it.

Public relations is free, but publicity is in the hands of a reporter and editor. You can lead a horse to your website, you can send him a press release, you can e-mail him a tip, but you can’t make him drink it…or use the information. Matt Drudge gets thousands of e-mails a day…but somehow, he recently saw fit to plug the new book of his liberal friend, Camille Paglia, in a special report, and prominently display the book’s hot-pink graphic image on the site along with its link.

Matt will take advertising from almost anyone, but he can’t control who will choose to place it. If liberal clients were convinced by competent media buyers that a sizeable number of their target audience read the Drudge Report long enough and frequently enough to catch their advertising message, they’d run ads there. A media buyer wouldn’t even waste company time suggesting a Drudge Report ad placement. The more expensive the ad, the more careful the client’s media planning.

It’s not that Matt’s not accepting and displaying advertising from the left…for business reasons, their intermediaries aren’t accepting him.

In other words, Drudge would have to seriously go out of his way to find liberal advertisers…and considering that he spends most of his time each day monitoring the news, site, and massive e-mail, with no staff or social life, do you think he’s going out of his way to find more politically balanced advertising on his site?

Let’s look at how the Drudge Report is financed. Matt at first bragged that he carried no advertising because he wasn’t beholden to the powers that were who carried them. He changed that policy during the progress of Sidney Blumenthal’s $30 million lawsuit against him. The Miami Herald reported in 2003 that the site’s revenues come solely from advertising sold by Intermarkets. Drudge’s advertisers pay $3 per thousand impressions for banner ads, or $4,400 a day (discounted to $29,000 a week). Now, Matt was able to quit his day job and work on the site full-time when AOL and Wired paid him to run a column. Whatever income he generates now — and don’t you worry, boys and girls, he’s comfortably well-off — enables him to work when he wants to, afford the privacy and convenience he needs, and shell out judgment money next time he incorrectly reports that somebody beat his wife.

Think the public “deserves a good explanation” if he can’t take control over his domain? Well, we could all chip in and buy Matt a lifetime supply of Depends…but, oh, we found out in the last paragraph that he can afford his own Depends. One thing’s for sure in my own mind…if he had any reservation about being judged and labeled as something he is not, as TC puts it, he would have quit this ten years ago. Do be fair, he did tell Camille Paglia and Maer Roshan two years ago in a Radar interiview that he avoids getting too hardcore partisan for fear that he’d alienate readers. My guess is that he could be concerned about the right-dominated ads if he is aware of them (remember, he’s got his own Mozilla pop-up blocker) but isn’t going to rock his own boat to change things. He has accepted that he’s going to get “rhymed and slimed” — and indeed, he’s been the subject of rumors he could successfully sue for but has chosen not to. In a nutshell, the ad business and the misunderstanding along with it comes with the territory.

Do we have reason to be annoyed by the proliferation of political ads? Sure, why not? Do we have the right to complain about the pop-ups? Hell, yeah! Should we be, as Thought Criminal expressed, “frustrated to see another potentially-good source of news get co-opted by the right”? Well, let’s make sure we get the whole picture before we project our justifiable antsiness in the wrong place.

Still feeling queasy about all this interstitial overload? Download Firefox and e-mail me in the morning.

RegoPark is a pseudonym for a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.