There has been widespread speculation concerning the whereabouts of Matt Drudge, as his news aggregate web site continues its historic downward spiral.
Is Drudge still affiliated with the site? Did Drudge sell the site to rabid liberals? These questions persist while traffic on drudge’s site has lost 30 percent of its unique visitors in approximately three months.
But our crack researchers have discovered a different venture Drudge has launched which could help explain his whereabouts, although he literally could be anywhere based on Drudge’s newly discovered venture.
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Drudge now owns a travel agency in Florida called
Moon Traveler? What?
Florida corporation records show that the address Drudge used for the travel company matches the Miami address he uses for his media company. This is hardly high-level sleuthing, however, it must be noted no one else in the news media found this, so what does that say about the news media these days?
If Drudge was running a lunch truck instead of his news site, that would be newsworthy too. But a travel agency for a guy that many say has vanished? That’s quite insteresting.
We did notice Drudge today — or whoever is running his site — was trumpeting Matt as one of the most influential people in the media, based on some news article. Perhaps that was written months ago.
Web numbers just got worse for Matt Drudge’s spiraling news site.
And November brought an additional loss of almost 12 percent in web visitors to the embattled news site.
The loss of readers for Drudge since Septemeber is staggering. Drudge’s overall web traffic was down nearly 18 percent in September and October, according to the tracking metrics on Similar Web. That massive and accelrated slide went from approximately 93 million visits to 77 million.
Now the latest number puts Drudge at 68 million, down from 77 million a month ago.
News consumers here have clearly spoken and Drudge appears to be in serious trouble with these numbers. He is bleeding former loyalists and often, regaining them is an elusive and expensive task.
Obviously. Drudge — if he is even still running the site himself at this point — remains uninterested in slowing th bleeding. And the site isn’t just bleeding out, it is hemmoraging.
Drudge’s lost traffic, added up since August, is tetering on 30 percent. Last month I wrote about the signifigance of that number. Here is a recap:
I have used the Enron model — specifically the schematics of its plummeting stock index — as a barometer for pinpointing problematic corporate warning signs, trap doors, and wayward executives and it rarely fails.
That type of rapid slide, even though it is web traffic compared to stock price, is beginning to parallel Enron’s stock model.
The point of no return for Enron was between January and March 2001 — a mere 90-day span — when the stock price spiraled 33 percent from approximately $80 per share to $53.
Drudge’s web numbers are on a parallel trajectory. In July, Drudge was pulling almost 100 million web views (95 million). Now he’s at 68 million. In fact, he’s now witnessing a historic collapse that eclipses the Enron model.
We’re not sure what planet Drudge has booked a ticket to through his Moon Traveler agency, but he may want to return to reality before his site completely implodes.
–Thomas Paine