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How the Drudge Report ushered in the age of Trump

Twenty years ago, Matt Drudge’s reports on the Lewinsky affair nearly brought down Bill Clinton. He was seen as the wellspring of a new, hyper-aggressive American conservatism – but has he been outflanked by his imitators?

A t precisely 9.32pm and two seconds by his Californian clock, Matt Drudge hit the send button on his home computer and changed the world. It was Saturday 17 January 1998, beyond midnight in Washington where President Clinton had no idea what was about to hit him.

“NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN; BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT”

The headline was posted in such small print that, were it not for the capital letters, a reader might have mistaken it for a dispatch on corn prices rather than an avalanche that would propel Bill Clinton all the way to impeachment. But then, Drudge never has run with the typographical crowd.

Two hours later, he followed up with a longer post in which he elaborated that Newsweek had spiked a story from its then investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Had it been published, Drudge said, the story would have revealed that a young, still anonymous female intern had been a “frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office” where she developed a sexual relationship with the president.

The next day the Drudge Report published her name: Monica Lewinsky.

The storm unleashed that Saturday night was all the more potent for coming from a single individual operating out of a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood where he lived with a cat named Cat, three TVs, three computers, a satellite dish and a police scanner. Not long before, he had been selling T-shirts in a gift shop at CBS Studios .

Twenty years later, we can now see that Drudge, 51, sparked a revolution – a double one at that. Politically, his Lewinsky scoops heralded a new kind of American conservatism that was devil-may-care, iconoclastic, hyper-aggressive and populist. If that sounds familiar, given the fireworks bursting daily out of today’s White House, then that is no coincidence.

“Looking back, he was the beginning of a cultural revolution which we are still in the midst of right now,” says David Horowitz, a conservative writer who helped to bail out Drudge shortly before the Lewinsky affair broke. At the time Drudge was fighting a $30m lawsuit against the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, whom he had falsely accused of abusing his wife – one of the earliest examples in the internet age of rightwing fake news.

The second revolution Drudge sparked was within the media. By exposing not just the president’s tryst with an intern, but the decision by Newsweek to hold off on the story, he planted a bomb under both the presidency and the mainstream media. “Matt Drudge broke the fraternity of the guardians of the culture,” Horowitz says.

The “fraternity” was aghast at Drudge’s rise. CBS’s Face the Nation refused to sully itself by having Drudge on air. When NBC did extend an invitation, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, scoffed: “The notion of a cyber gossip sitting on Meet the Press would have been unthinkable!” Drudge lapped up the opprobrium, trolling his critics with the comment: “I’m not a journalist, I’m a kangaroo.”

Despite the brickbats, Drudge rapidly attracted a large readership with his gregarious mix of aggregated Beltway and Hollywood gossip, news stories drawn from outlets spanning the political range, and headlines that were clickbait before the term had been coined. “There’s a new sex droid in town”, was one of his recent headlines.

Where readers flocked, news editors followed with tails between legs. A skim of the Drudge headlines became an essential start to any TV, press or radio editors’ day, helping to define what was shaping up to be the 24-hour news cycle. And with no legacy overheads and a lean staff, Drudge was soon raking in the money, the proceeds of which he enjoys today in his 10-acre property outside Miami where he moved in the wake of the Lewinsky furore.

While the readership has always leaned heavily male and conservative, his devoted fans include unexpected figures, such as feminist intellectual Camille Paglia. She was one of the first established voices to break ranks and endorse the site at a time when it was still being almost universally derided.

“I saw in Matt Drudge the triumph of the populist tabloids,” says Paglia. “It’s amazing how no one, in all these decades, has been able to imitate, displace, or supplant Drudge – because he is a true American original.”

Paglia is right: it is amazing that the Drudge Report continues to enjoy the influence it does. The point-size of its banner headline has crept up a bit, but otherwise the layout of the site is virtually unchanged from the original design, as though it were stuck in time.

According to analytics company comScore, the Drudge Report had 2.5 million unique visitors in November. That reach is amplified when you consider the strong engagement of readers who tend to return frequently, producing a total 292m page views that month.

While the Drudge Report is a rightwing site true to the libertarian, small government, anti-abortion , climate change-denying world view of its creator, its impact is felt much more widely. When the Guardian – not a natural Drudge ally – broke the story of Steve Bannon’s incendiary remarks in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury this month, fully a quarter of the vast traffic it generated came through Drudge.

Over the past 20 years, the rightwing megaphone has grown far more sophisticated. Savage Nation (1994), Fox News (1996), InfoWars (1999) and Breitbart (2005) – which was started by Drudge’s first assistant, Andrew Breitbart – have all matured in line with the Drudge Report (1995). But instead of threatening his supremacy, they have provided political ballast to his idiosyncrasies.

Drudge is “the wellspring for the conservative media ecosystem”, wrote the Republican strategist Rick Wilson in the Daily Beast .

The threat to the Drudge Report has come, paradoxically, not so much from rightwing competitors but from the very source of his own success – individualised news born of the internet. When he sent out his first newsletter via email to friends, he issued a genuinely personal take on current affairs, an independent act of defiance that appealed to his libertarian values.

That act has spawned countless imitators, but instead of being truly individualised, they are corralled through the modern monoliths Facebook and Twitter. The development has left Drudge baffled and bemused, judging from recent remarks of this increasingly reclusive man.

In October 2015, Drudge, who now rarely allows himself to be seen or heard in public and who did not respond to a Guardian request for interview, turned up unexpectedly in the Austin, Texas studios of Alex Jones’s InfoWars. He remained unseen and behind camera, but did speak passionately for several minutes.

“Twenty years. I’ve had a hell of a run,” Drudge said to Jones from the shadows, clearly feeling nostalgic. Then he got down to business.

“I don’t do the socials,” he said with a telling linguistic awkwardness. “I’m not on Facebook. I’ve got the Twitter thing, but even that’s disgusting.”

The shift has been stealthy but seismic. The Drudge Report’s legendary ability to dictate the news cycle has been stolen by Twitter, where editors – instead of having to rely on Drudge’s judgment – can exercise their own. “You used to see something go up on Drudge and hear it on cable news an hour later – now it’s all moved over to the Twittersphere,” Wilson says.

That trend was temporarily abated during 2016 when the site enjoyed a revival as cheerleader-in-chief for Donald Trump. As Politico put it, Drudge went “all in on Trump”. He reserved his banner headlines for Trump-friendly subjects such as immigration and trade, while running attack stories on contesting Republican candidates such as Ted Cruz . After Trump won his party’s nomination, Drudge provided the same service in the general election, mocking Hillary Clinton as a “brain in a jar” and accusing the rest of the media of covering-up her hypothyroidism .

Much as a Trump victory was palpably desired by Drudge, you have to wonder whether he will come to regret the outcome, in the manner of Frankenstein and his monster.

Dylan Byers, CNN’s senior reporter on media and politics, points out that, by giving Trump a leg-up into the White House, he has helped to create a media phenomenon that is far more powerful than any Drudge Report. “For 20 years, Drudge set the gold standard for gossip, sensationalism and trolling, making him one of the most influential figures in political media,” Byers says. “But Trump is sui generis. He is his own media outlet. He does his own trolling and creates his own sensationalism. The controversies Trump creates with one tweet make Drudge’s entire homepage feel uninspired.”

Uninspired. That’s a word seldom attached to Matt Drudge. But nothing is safe in the Trump era, it seems. Not even the wellspring of conservative media.

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Can Matt Drudge Survive Without the MAGA Faithful?

By Caleb Ecarma

Matt Drudge, the mysterious media maven, conservative kingmaker, and arguably the most influential news aggregator in history, has officially found himself on Donald Trump ’s “no longer hot” list. It’s a club that includes just one other member: Vanity Fair, whose Oscar party the president declared “no longer ‘hot’” before he took office. For someone who repeats insults reflexively—“like a dog” and “choked” and “low energy” being prime examples—this shows remarkable restraint. It’s a safe bet, then, that this specific insult is reserved for those toward which Trump feels complete and utter disdain.

Matt Drudge has earned his place on the president’s hit list. He was a key player in helping the president win the 2016 Republican primary, and thus the presidency, and visited the White House early on—Trump once called him a “great gentleman” and treated his headlines like gospel. Why the fall from grace? The answer is fairly straightforward: In Trump’s simple mind, those who exclusively praise him are good, and those who don’t are bad, no matter their shared history. Drudge was one of the earliest major media figures to champion then candidate Trump in 2015 and acted as a de facto publicist on behalf of the campaign, according to former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg, a claim he made in Matthew Lysiak ’s biography The Drudge Revolution. However, last summer, cracks began to show in their symbiotic relationship as the Drudge Report’s top headline blared, “No New Wall At All!” The aggregation site, which regularly drives hundreds of millions of page views every month, hasn’t let up on the president since, following its initial shot with a jab over the expansion of big government policies “On Trump Watch”; a line on how Trump’s “trash talk” has hurt his favorability among suburban women; and a warning from farmers that the president's trade wars are “ruining our markets.”

By late 2019, Drudge’s relatively nuanced, policy-based scrutiny of Trump had bloomed into him seemingly hopping on the pro-impeachment bandwagon. As the White House’s Ukraine scandal dragged on last fall, the Drudge Report’s headlines began to read like HuffPost, rather than a publication routinely read on air by conservative talk-radio hosts; selections included “Republican criticism [of Trump] mounts,” “Senate likelier to remove,” “Trump on Brink,” and one that simply juxtaposed the word “Swamped” with a strategically chosen photo of the president looking deflated.

The president returned fire in April when Drudge ran a headline that read “NO PEAK YET,” warning of the impending body count caused by coronavirus. “I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others,” Trump tweeted . He also retweeted a post accusing Drudge of sensationalizing and spreading lies about the pandemic. And he concluded the series by claiming that the Drudge Report’s readership is dwindling by the day: “People are dropping off like flies!” For the fedora-wearing recluse, who is rarely seen outside his South Florida compound, much less driven to make a public comment of any kind, it was apparently a bridge too far. “The past 30 days has been the most eyeballs in Drudge Report's 26 year-history,” Drudge wrote in an emailed statement to CNN. “Heartbreaking that it has been under such tragic circumstances.”

The conflict escalated again this month, when a particularly aggressive Drudge headline noted Trump’s denial that a “Mini-Stroke Sent Him to Hospital,” complete with a beautifully clickable kicker: “VIDEO: [Trump] Dragging Right Leg.” This was apparently the final straw for Trump, who decided it was time for no more Mr. “really nice guy.” He responded by insisting that Drudge did not support him in 2016 and “doesn’t support me now. Maybe that’s why he is doing poorly. His Fake News report on Mini-Strokes is incorrect.” Trump then posited that Drudge is “Possibly thinking about himself, or the other party’s ‘candidate,’” referencing his claims about Joe Biden ’s diminishing mental state. Curiously, Drudge has not pushed the theory that Biden is losing it, despite most conservative outlets obsessing over the Democratic nominee’s supposed cognitive decline. His decision to opt out is particularly notable given that, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, his site aided in spreading conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton ’s supposedly failing health.

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The president has continued to batter his old friend this week, tweeting on Sunday that Drudge’s site “is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he’s bleeding profusely, and is no longer ‘hot.’ But others are!” In a Monday tweet, he claimed, “Our people have all left Drudge,” and tagged the site’s namesake to call him “a confused MESS, has no clue what happened. Down 51%.” He finished his tantrum by promoting a new Drudge Report competitor, writing that his supporters are now reading sites “like REVOLVER.” Launched over the summer, just months after the president first began attacking Drudge, Revolver News is a conservative aggregation website that caters to ardent Trump supporters and coronavirus skeptics with headlines like: “COVID-19 Lockdowns Over 10 Times More Deadly Than Pandemic Itself.” Its notable readers thus far include Rep. Paul Gosar , an Arizona Republican who pushed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and Michelle Malkin, a right-wing commentator who recently hailed a white nationalist figure as one of the “New Right leaders.” Darren J. Beattie, an ex–White House speechwriter who left his Trump appointment in 2018 after it was revealed that he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists, works for Revolver News—and appeared Tuesday night on Tucker Carlson ’s Fox News show.

In lockstep with the president, Carlson also pronounced Revolver News “effectively the new Drudge Report, since the actual Drudge Report went completely insane,” and claimed “many of Drudge’s longtime readers have fled to Revolver News…to fill the void.” During a July segment on “what happened to Matt Drudge,” Carlson wrote him off as “now firmly a man of the progressive left,” saying that “at times his site is indistinguishable from the Daily Beast or any other woke propaganda outlet.” (Drudge seemingly fired back at the host’s insults on Wednesday by featuring a headline on Fox’s hair and makeup department layoffs alongside a photo of Carlson looking stupefied under his signature Waspy bangs.)

Carlson isn’t the only member of right-wing media royalty to shun the man they once obsessively turned to for their daily news diet. In August, Rush Limbaugh heavily implied that Drudge crossed Trump not for ideological reasons, but for the money. “My email inbox every day, ‘What’s happening to Drudge, Rush?’And I tell people, ‘Have you heard of clicks?’” said the conservative talk-radio giant.

Limbaugh’s less-popular counterpart Mark Levin made similar accusations last week after Drudge heavily promoted Bob Woodward ’s new book, which revealed that Trump acknowledged the deadly nature of coronavirus in February while lying to the public by likening it to a common flu. “What’s this, the 5th or 6th book in recent weeks pushed by Drudge and the media and intended to elect Biden and smear Trump?” Levin tweeted. “Drudge sells out to big media, betrays conservatives who made his site popular. Hawking 60 Minutes and Woodward. There’s no longer any reason for the existence of that website,” he added on Sunday. It appears the Drudge splash that teed off Levin’s explosion was a headline that described Woodward’s book, Rage, as a “Brutal Look Inside White House Chaos” and promoted an excerpt about Trump’s “COVID Cover-Up” bombshell.

Ironically, in one of Drudge’s last media appearances, he spoke to Alex Jones in his Austin studio—but true to form, he remained off-camera and did the entire interview from "literally in the shadows, behind a curtain”—and told the Infowars founder, “You’re not alone. Limbaugh, [Michael] Savage, [Sean] Hannity, Levin…. I’m friends with all of them.”

Counter to his peers’ claims that his anti-Trump pivot is a self-interested move, Drudge’s traffic has gone down significantly in the past year. TheRighting, a site dedicated to analyzing and tracking the popularity of top conservative media outlets, reported that the Drudge Report has experienced a 38% decline from its almost 2.4 million unique visits in July 2019, to less than 1.5 million unique visitors in July of this year.

The site’s explicit defiance toward Trump and his administration, and the president’s rebukes in turn, are almost certainly a contributing factor in this downward trend. But another recent massive change to the conservative media landscape might also have a hand in Drudge’s decreasing readership. There is now a sizable portion of the GOP base that has swallowed the mind-altering QAnon conspiracy theory, meaning that relatively mainstream conservative sites like the Drudge Report just don’t give them the same high that was once sufficiently extreme to satiate their media appetite. For that subset of neurotically online pro-Trump lunatics, Drudge’s headlines might as well be cheap product cut with heaps of baking soda. The millions-of-members-strong QAnon Facebook groups, on the other hand, offer that pure Bolivian fish-scale, scratch-your-face-off content they crave.

— Melania Trump Sounds a Lot Like Her Husband in Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s New Book — Jesmyn Ward Writes Through Grief Amid Protests and Pandemic — How Trump’s Handling of White Supremacists Could Create a Homegrown Crisis — Ashley Etienne May Be Biden’s Deadliest Weapon Against Trump — What’s the Reality Behind Netflix Hit Selling Sunset ? — How to Abolish the Police , According to Josie Duffy Rice — The Pandemic Is Creating an Endless Summer in the Hamptons — From the Archive: The Perks and Perils of Being Donald Trump’s Daughter

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Drudge Report, a Former Trump Ally, Looks to Biden

Matt Drudge and Donald Trump boosted each other four years ago. Now his site says, in prominent type, “The World Moves On.”

By Tiffany Hsu

Matt Drudge started showing signs that he had soured on President Trump months before the election. Since the vote, the fedora-topped media pioneer has seemed even more eager to distance himself and his site from the man in the White House.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Drudge Report blared in a headline within minutes of CNN’s calling the election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Saturday. For nearly 24 hours afterward, that headline remained at the top of the site. In addition, a screenshot of the Drudge Report main page, with the “YOU’RE FIRED!” headline, has been the only tweet on the @DRUDGE Twitter account since Saturday.

In his 25-year career, Mr. Drudge has proved himself an expert aggregator, a digital journalist who links to articles plucked from the web. And he has done it with style, packaging his links with tabloid-poetry headlines that make readers click.

After the “YOU’RE FIRED!” headline, Drudge Report turned this week to the coming transfer of power.

THE WORLD MOVES ON.

Americans pivot from red-hot Trump to Biden’s seasoned cool.

Trump defied gravity; now falls back to earth, future TBD.

Dogs will return to White House: Biden’s German shepherds!

Four years ago, Drudge Report heralded Mr. Trump’s “rock-star welcome in Florida” and linked to coverage of his rallies. The journalist Carl Bernstein credited Mr. Drudge’s support as a key part of Mr. Trump’s political rise, and Mr. Trump called Mr. Drudge “a great gentleman.”

Drudge Report started distancing itself from the president last year, a development that was not lost on Mr. Trump, who said on Twitter in April: “I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others.” Conservative sites accused Mr. Drudge of being an agent of the left.

Now Drudge Report is filled with headlines that describe the outgoing president as “bitter” and “not a good loser.” Several links lead to articles debunking Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud.

Mr. Drudge, who rarely gives interviews, did not reply to requests for comment. His recent work shows him ready to close the chapter on the current president and focus on the president-elect.

On Wednesday, his site included two lines of commentary — prominently displayed, in red type — that did not link to an external story and compared Mr. Biden favorably to the conservative hero Ronald Reagan.

Biden now up to 50.8 percent of popular vote, topping Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 …

Is highest percentage for challenger since FDR in 1932 …

Tiffany Hsu is a media reporter for the business desk, focusing on advertising and marketing. Previously, she covered breaking business news. Before joining The Times, she wrote about the California economy for The Los Angeles Times. More about Tiffany Hsu

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Welcome to the all new version 7 of the one and only official Drudge Report app. Here's all you need to know to use the app to it's fullest: *** NOTIFICATIONS *** On first open, iOS will ask you to allow notifications. Tapping "Allow" results in alerts being sent to your phone whenever there is a siren, new banner or a highlighted headline (e.g. colored red.) Review these urgent headlines anytime by tapping on the urgent headlines button (bell with lines under it.) Then to modify which alerts you receive by tapping on the settings (gear) icon. *** SCROLL TO TOP *** Tap on the reload button. *** COLUMN SWITCHING (phones) *** Tap on the columns icon once to be taken to the top of the first column. Tap again for the top of the second column. Tap for the third column. Tap one more time and you'll be brought to the top. Repeat as desired. A personal response for those who email in bug reports or suggestions for improvement. Posting bugs in the comments may not get the attention they deserve. [email protected]

Version 7.0.3

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Ratings and Reviews

Functionality review.

The app is fairly rudimentary, as the site is. But it has some functionality issues. There are times where having the application open will pause background music/podcasts and you have to restart your music and close the app. That could be fixed. The “alerts” or “breaking news” pings are absolutely dumb in the way they work. There’s also a cache issue with photos that were on the page associated with links - you can see as you’re scrolling the images get replaced. Old images remain cached and aren’t properly replaced or cleared in a timely fashion upon opening the app again. Overall, Matt Drudge (if he even runs the site anymore) should be ashamed that this application runs so poorly. It’s not hard to find a company who could make an iOS app better than this. Even if it’s a simple site, the application should work properly as such.

Discovered Drudge sold this to the liberal Otto family under condition of secrecy

I know that Matt drudge had a falling out with Trump in 2018 and I thought that was the reason for the one sided stories against him, but As the articles on this website become more and more one-sided and selective, for example, the betting odds, they only reported on the one outdated betting and said that Biden now overwhelmingly favored to beat Trump when all of the other betting I’d say that Trump is favored, I decided to investigate myself and found that Matt drudge sold this website to the liberal anti trump Otto family under condition of secrecy that he never disclosed it was sold to them. Basically so that they can be fraudulent. They can pretend like it’s a conservative website saying negative things about Trump and about conservative so it looks like they have more credibility so people will think a conservative website is saying it. I think that’s really sad that this is the Otto families life work, tricking people. Stand up for what you believe. No matter what side you’re on. And make a difference that way. They use the same tactics they accuse trump of. They’re frauds.

No longer relevant

Drudge Report used to be a decent (a term I will use loosely) fairly unbiased new reporting source. Fast forward 5 years later and it’s become nothing but a propaganda based, over the top leftist shell of its former self. When you are constantly posting stories from Yahoo, you know that a company has truly hit Rockbottom. Some of the absolutely worst “news” website used as links on the DrudgeReport page, have made in an irrelevant source for any reliable news. But hey, if you like senseless gossip sites like the Dailymail UK, TMZ, andthe National Enquirer, then you’ve come to the right place. Read, be angry and be stupid.

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Matt Drudge played a major role in the Clinton impeachment. Now he’s back for another round.

“Impeach Yourselves!” read the banner headline on Breitbart.com Wednesday morning, summing up what much of the right-wing news world thinks of the congressional impeachment inquiry into President Trump that had been launched the previous day.

“The psychotic anti-Trump hysteria has now completely overtaken the entire Democratic Party,” Fox News anchor and Trump booster Sean Hannity told nearly 4 million viewers Tuesday . “They think anytime a Republican is elected president, there must have been something ‘illegitimate’ going on,” Kevin D. Williamson wrote in the National Review on Thursday.

So far, so typical. This is, after all, the umpteenth Trump scandal to set the country’s mainstream news outlets on fire while conservatives roll their eyes.

But there’s one conspicuous exception: The legendary Drudge Report has in recent days been spewing ALL CAPS, bolded, underlined, and sometimes bright-red headlines that sound terribly grim for the president.

“HILL ROCKED”

“REPUBLICAN CRACKS EMERGE”

“AMERICA BRACES FOR IMPEACHMENT”

These were presumably written by the elusive Matt Drudge, who has been courted by Republican presidents and would-be presidents since he helped bring about President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 using exactly the same website and screaming all-capital type. In some ways, Drudge’s fervent coverage of “IMPEACHMENT 2019” is a return to form. But it’s also an extraordinary break between the right-wing Internet’s godfather and its favorite president.

Drudge, who could not be reached for comment, exploded out of obscurity during the Clinton era, when he turned his political gossip blog into a fount of juicy scoops about the president.

“ EXCLUSIVE . . . MORE THAN 75 PIXS THAT SHOW LEWINSKY/CLINTON TOGETHER! ” read a typical headline. “ LEWINSKY THREATENED SUICIDE OVER CLINTON .”

Some media watchdogs complained that Drudge’s scoops often proved imaginary, but Drudge nevertheless broke the news on Jan. 17, 1998, that Newsweek was sitting on a story about Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky , which helped elevate an obscure D.C. rumor to front-page news and congressional intervention.

Drudge then became more or less the spiritual founder of and gatekeeper to the emerging conservative Internet. “ Call it the Drudge effect ,” Chris Cillizza wrote in The Washington Post in 2007, after the website disrupted Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination by posting an old video of him praising abortion rights.

Drudge’s favor became almost a necessity for any Republican who wanted to win or keep national office. The New York Times reported that the campaigns of both President George W. Bush and the party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, employed unofficial emissaries to Drudge, tasked with keeping him and his millions of readers on their side.

Even Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had one in her 2008 primary fight: consultant Tracy Sefl, who was nicknamed the “ Drudge Whisperer ” for her ability to get positive Clinton headlines on the site.

“It’s been a big mistake for conservatives to assume that Drudge is not pliable,” Sefl told The Washington Post. “His loyalties are to himself and to the site, not to the party.”

But on the whole, the Drudge Report has reliably derided Democrats and championed Republicans.

Trump was no different, at first.

In the final weeks of his presidential race with Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Drudge Report ran oversized headlines falsely claiming her husband, Bill, had a secret love child .

The site announced Trump’s inauguration with a two-word, plus-seven size headline: “ AMERICA AGAIN! ”

Trump has returned the affection, once taking a break from his State of the Union preparations to tweet an image of the Drudge Report, which had just dubbed him “TEFLON DONALD.” His campaign has gone so far as to send fundraising emails that mimic the website’s typewriter/ransom-letter aesthetic.

It’s unclear what, if anything, caused the Drudge-Trump bond to fray this summer. CNN’s Oliver Darcy noticed it last month, pointing out in newsletters that Drudge had been hammering Trump over economic news for several consecutive days.

And then came Tuesday’s impeachment announcement, and the deluge of red, bold and underlined Drudgelines:

“COMPLAINT ALLEGES COVER-UP”

“DEMS SPEED IT UP”

“IMPEACHMENT 2019”

“It may be a strange thing to say, but Drudge is making a journalistic decision here,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute. “Not only is he leaning in, but the places he’s linking to are an interesting range: the Hill. MSNBC. It’s not just Ann Coulter; it’s also Peggy Noonan,” referring to the far-right and more moderate commentators, respectively.

“He’s a weather vane, in a sense. If you’re a Republican or conservative or an operative and you’re trying to see which way the wind is blowing, the tone of Drudge has to have an effect on you. This is a signal. This is bad.”

Sefl, the Hillary Clinton campaign adviser, didn’t find Drudge’s break with Trump very surprising given his involvement with the country’s previous impeachment scandal. “A story of this magnitude is his caffeine,” she said.

How a conservative columnist helped push a flawed Ukraine narrative

Matt Drudge Has Barely Changed Anything About The Drudge Report In The Last 20 Years. This Summer, He Upended Its Advertising Business.

A change to the secretive publisher’s business has revealed new details about his operation and is attracting scrutiny from the ad industry.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

The Drudge Report, with its Web 1.0 design offering a single page of links, is one of the enduring internet media business success stories. Two decades after rising to prominence for breaking news of the Bill Clinton– Monica Lewinsky affair, it remains one of the most popular websites in the United States and a key source of right-wing ideas for its readers, including President Donald Trump .

Owner Matt Drudge is also still adept at attracting attention, such as last week when his was the only major news site to post the El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter’s manifesto. But the site has always resisted the temptation to build anything beyond the simplest business of selling display advertising on a single homepage.

Now, Drudge has quietly flipped the switch on perhaps the biggest change he’s ever made: He’s ditched his longtime advertising partner for a new representative, in the process revealing new details about his business and attracting scrutiny of how his site operates.

The reclusive publisher does not disclose revenue figures, but estimates put the site’s annual haul well into the realm of millions of dollars per year. Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence platform, estimates that over the past 12 months the site generated more than $30 million in ad revenue. Another estimate from the Global Disinformation Index , to be published in a report next month, pegs revenue at $9 million per year.

In a surprising turn, Drudge Report removed ads between the end of May and mid-July, according to Danny Rogers, a cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, a project that’s analyzing domains to generate “risk ratings of the world’s media sites.” After noticing an absence of ads on Drudge around May 31, “we didn’t see any ads on Drudge until about July 12,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News.

During that period, Drudge cast off his advertising representative of close to 20 years, Intermarkets, in favor of a new and unknown company, Granite Cubed. It has no record in the digital ad industry, was only registered as a company in March of this year, and lists no staff or owners on its websites. Yet it just landed one of the biggest websites in the US.

“Any time a 20-year relationship comes to an end is certainly a surprising turn of events,” said Jay Friedman, president of Goodway Group , a digital agency that specializes in programmatic media buying.

Corporate records show that Granite Cubed is owned by Margaret Otto. She and her husband, Adrian, have a business association with the Drudge family that goes back years. The couple acquired Refdesk, a reference website founded by Bob Drudge, Matt’s father, in 2017. They also operated a company that began hosting the Drudge Report in 1999 and later added Breitbart as a customer. (The couple did not answer questions about whether they still own that hosting company or if it’s still hosting Drudge or Breitbart.)

Adrian Otto is the technical director of Google Cloud. He told BuzzFeed News he is not involved with Granite Cubed. Upon joining Google in 2017 from Rackspace, he said, he “stopped operating [his] other business interests” and is no longer involved with “hosting duties” for other websites. Otto was previously listed as the technical contact in the domain registration of breitbart.com, and was thanked by name in the foreword to Andrew Breitbart’s book about Hollywood.

“I knew Andrew Breitbart when he was alive, and helped him with some technical work,” Otto said.

Margaret Otto declined to discuss her company’s plans for Drudge Report or Refdesk, which she said is also represented by Granite. She wouldn’t say if she represents other websites or answer other questions, such as whether Matt or Bob Drudge were shareholders in Granite.

“We respect our customer’s privacy, and therefore, cannot comment on the other questions,” she said in an email.

Friedman said the connections between the Ottos and Drudges raise a question of whether the move to Granite Cubed is “a relationship play [or] a revenue maximization play,” given that today’s representation firms need to be “incredibly technically savvy and have a really good grasp on how to [succeed] in an automated ad market.”

Drudge was characteristically silent when emailed by BuzzFeed News for comment about his new advertising partner and the strategy for his site. His old partners were also hesitant to speak, reinforcing how one of the web’s most influential websites remains in many ways a one-man black box.

“Intermarkets no longer represents DrudgeReport.com, and it is our policy to not discuss former clients with the media,” said Kevin Lucido, the CEO of Intermarkets, which represents other conservative publishers, such as the Media Research Center and the Political Insider.

For his part, Bob Drudge said in an email, “I am retired and have no comment.”

It all makes for a startling shift for a publisher best known for a strategy rooted in changing nothing about his site’s operation. It’s also causing the ad industry to look closely at the mysterious new firm and its high-profile customer.

Friedman said Granite Cubed’s lack of a track record and profile in the industry will be a challenge if it tries to sell ad space directly to brands and agencies. “Certainly if you decide to go to big brands and sell directly, the Granite Cubed thing is going to be challenging. [Brands] get 100 requests a week for meetings and this probably isn’t going to float to the top,” even if they’re representing Drudge, he said.

Others in the industry say they had concerns about Drudge long before the switch to Granite. A manager at another ad tech company told BuzzFeed News he blocked the Drudge Report from its systems in 2017 due to “unacceptable auto-refreshing practices.”

After being loaded in a web browser, Drudge’s site automatically reloads itself after two minutes. The manager said the frequent refresh rate for Drudge Report raised concerns about the number of ads being loaded that were actually able to be viewed by users.

“The page was refreshing approximately every 120 seconds, with no consideration given to user activity. The user could have it open in a background tab and it would accrue [ad] impressions all day long,” said the manager, who requested anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media about specific websites.

The manager said they also removed refdesk.com from the platform due to similar concerns.

Drudge, Granite, and Intermarkets declined to comment on the refresh rate or the comments from the ad tech company manager.

In an interview with Ad Age last year , Erik Requidan, an Intermarkets executive who helped oversee Drudge’s monetization efforts, spoke about how the site’s seemingly low-tech design belied a more “sophisticated” ad operation.

“What seems like a pretty simple thing on the surface is actually quite sophisticated and effective,” he said.