Eat Your Heart Out, Drudge Haters

For a lot of us, Matt Drudge seems about as cutting edge as last Tuesday's soggy tuna fish sandwich. While he obviously helped put Internet journalism and blogging itself on the map--recognizing almost before anyone else how Usenet postings and a wide network of well-placed snitches could morph into e-journalism--the whole right-wing boy toy and latter-day-fedora-clad-Walter Winchell-wannabe aspect of the guy was a little over the top. It grew old after about a month. And that month was several years ago.
Which is all the more reason why the story in the new Business 2.0 on Drudge, Inc. will be an eye-opener for lots of people. It estimates that Drudge and his two-man operation (he uses a little known assistant) clears $800,000 a year from his site. It quotes the head of his ad outsourcing operation observing that ad space on the Drudge site sells out months in advance.
None of which will necessarily make you like him or his hokey persona any more, but as a model for building a web journalism site, you'd have to concede there may well be a few lessons in there for all of us, no?
--John Ettorre