Love/Hate for Drudge

How did the Drudge Report become one of the most popular news websites on the internet? I think in terms of actual hits, it was the 3rd-most visited news site on the web last month, behind Yahoo and MSNBC. From a design standpoint, its layout is a disaster, completely unattractive, nothing but 3 columns of type and varying fonts. Very few pictures or altering colors to catch the eye, almost NO original content (every link just takes you to a news story from some other website). This guy (Matt Drudge) now has his own radio show and is probably RAKING in the cash from the hits on his website, and to this day it looks like something I could throw together in about an hour with Microsoft Word.

And yet, I visit it every day. I've come to appreciate it for its simplicity, quick loading, and there are usually headlines there that the major sites, with their other vested interests, won't touch. I love it for the links to websites like this, a listing of some of the more bizarre offerings on craigslist for girls (and guys) trying to score tickets to Obama's rally in Chicago on election Tuesday. This was my favorite:

"Are you in need of an extra kidney? Know of someone who needs one? I have 2 good kidneys which is a little excessive. Ill give you one of them for two tickets to tonight’s speech. I live in Denver and tried to get tickets the minute they were announced. Somehow the first come first serve registration did not work since I was put on the waitlist. So, I need two tickets for me and my girlfriend. I have an extra kidney. You take said organ, I take 2 tickets for this historic speech."



Since I have mostly voted conservative over the last few elections, I've never noticed as much of the bias that is obviously there, though. Having a more independent eye this year, I can tell pretty easily who Drudge is pulling for in the next election. His huge-font headline this morning was about how Obama "threw off" three journalists from his plane, all from papers that had endorsed McCain. Of course no mention of the conservative writers that McCain has also excised from HIS plane in the last couple weeks. There's also the fact that coming down to the wire, requests for space on Obama's plane are overtaking the number of seats, and it seems natural that in the last week before the election, he would probably want to engineer as much positive coverage as possible.