Maybe I'll be the first on the 'net to have noticed this, not that that would be any great achievement. Maybe it's a scoop of some sort, though, huh?
This is presently at the very top of The Drudge Report (home page)
THANKS FOR MAKING MARCH '08 THE BIGGEST MONTH IN THE DRUDGEREPORT'S 13 YEAR HISTORY!
MAIN PAGE LOADED 590,943,577 TIMES... TOPS MARCH 2007'S 425,371,511... TOPS MARCH 2006'S 287,443,312 ... MANY THANKS FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT... THE LOVERS AND THE HATERS... AND NEWS ENTHUSIASTS IN OVER 100 COUNTRIES!
I like Drudge and visit it every day for a fair synopsis of news. I like that he has all sorts of news, some even tending to the bizarre but true things that happen in this world. My momma also liked Drudge.
The numbers posted made me wonder about something, though. I know the page has an auto-refresh script; I timed it several times and it was three minutes from entering, then the page refreshed.
The website updates frequently, so I can understand the reasoning behind having that particular script. I've used it for various and sundry reasons in some of my own crude and amateurish pages I've made.
(I would post the source code for the auto-refresh, but you have to tinker with it to get it to render without Blogger stripping it out, just like MSN Groups)
What I'm wondering is there surely must be others like myself, who will leave it on the page after viewing the newest headlines. (most of the time, the headlines of hot topics will stay on the page, but sometimes be bumped down by the latest news) I've done it a lot over this last year, watching for election returns and news.
Anyway...
Would the several refreshes count as a single hit of those millions, or is it a new count when clicking "Back" to the Drudge home page?
I sometimes right click/open new window on certain URLs on the Drudge site such as Breitbart, because I'm always clicking away from that link to a deeper link within that website, to view a video or for some of that weird stuff I enjoy reading.
I suppose, looking at what they claim, "page loads" might very well be accurate. I'm wondering why he couldn't at least estimate "readers".
Is Drudge fudging the numbers? You know where you go for lying! (look what happened to Pres. Clinton after Drudge broke the Lewinski scandal)
Makes me wonder 'bout that, too. I get a javascript error on Drudge (they're fairly common throughout the 'net, I think). Here's a screenshot; look at the js error line number:
April 3, 2008
Does Drudge Fudge?
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2 comments:
Yeah I am inclined to the numbers are really skewed and mean absolutely crap really. Each refresh of a page of course is a page load, whether its done by auto script or manually with the back button. What's also not shown in the source is the the actual processes by which all those news links are added, all we see is the html outcome. In other words think of it like this.. When we create a new post on blogger, or add any content, each time we do it, the actual page script is loaded by the server autoamtically, and then if you have those feeds that update on a regular schedule, each one of the servers the reciprocal links is hosted on is going to call the page to be reloaded too,sort of like a pyramid scheme of sorts. Theoretically I guess its possible without any actual readers at all but I know thats not true. I'm just saying auto scripting and trackbacks are a big part of them numbers. As far as actaul legitmate readers, that would be near impossible to find out, even with access to the raw logs, I get thousands of hits a month on my domain, and hell I dont even go there anymore! lol its all scripts and webcrawlers, spiders etc.. well theres another one, those search spiders are proabbly set to read the page a few times as well since the comnstent is changing so much and each of thsoe hits is a page load in the logs ;) and it would be interesting also to see how many links (numbers) to articles there were in March 2006 on the page, as compared to the number in 2007. to the number in 2008 , ya know what I mean? ;) YEah I'd say its a drudge fudge
G
I never thought about the feeds. I also didn't explain so well what I meant about the refreshes and coming back to the home page...but I guess you understood, anyway! lol
I read something very interesting about Google the other day in PC Mag. think it was. According to this article, Google doesn't even know how many servers they have, there's so many, and when one goes down, it's easier to just bypass it and plug in a new one.
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