The Drudge Report has hit the 1 billion pageview milestone for April 2016 according to digital insight firm SimilarWeb. The firms list of Top US Media Publishers for April shows the Drudge Report coming in at fourth with 1,044,831,000 pageviews. SimilarWeb breaks it down by Publishers, which include multiple sites and by Publications with include only one site. The Drudge Report is third on the Publications list.
This should be comforting news to Donald Trump because of Matt Drudge’s frequent links to positive Trump related stories. It could also be that Trump supporters frequent Drudge because that’s where they can find links to the most interesting news about their candidate, thus driving up the Drudge Report’s traffic.
The most visited US media publishers in April were Disney Media at 1.7 billion pageviews, MSN with 1.6 billion followed by Time Warner which had 1.2 billion pageviews for the month.
Some other popular well-known sites making the list below Drudge are Yahoo (697 million), New York Times (505 million), AOL (474 million), Buzzfeed (469 million), Gawker (418 million), Breitbart (83 million) and Mashable (80 million).
I believe that Drudge could more than double traffic if the website simply became mobile friendly, which it is currently not as it continues to be displayed in its cool vintage format, even when viewing with a mobile device. I think Matt Drudge could keep the format but still make it dynamically work for mobile devices which would substantially increase traffic considering that most top news sites now receive the majority of their traffic from mobile. The Drudge Report gets 94% of its traffic from desktop and overall 84% of its traffic is direct, which is unheard of in the industry. The Drudge Report is truley the media unicorn of internet news sites.
Overall, per the Drudge Report front page stats, the site has received 27,922,076 pageviews in the last 24 hours, 785 million in the last 31 days and 8.7 billion pageviews in the past year. This is an amazing accomplishment for a single page site which may only have Matt Drudge himself and possibly a few other aggregators helping him update the content.