Nielsen finally admits Drudge is cleaning their clocks, it appears. No surprise to me. I once watched Perez Hilton working his site at the coffee shop and he had Drudge on his screen for hours and hours. Good work, mate!

Page Views are up nearly 9% in the last year for the major online news sites. This is great news. We are living through a transition period, and one must adapt to the changes. The news business is not "dying" as so many fear. It's just changing format. Thanks for the info. Becky in Boston

This is another fine example of using misleading stats to make a point. My old stats teacher always harped that you can make a stat say anything you want it to do. All this is saying is that if a particular person went to Drudge in Feb, then they did it an average of nearly 20 times. That's all. Doesn't mean that Drudge is now the leading news site, especially when you look at the 37K+ unique visitors to CNN vice the 3,400+ for Drudge. I'm a Drudge junkie, but the above list just confirms that those who go to Drudge, tend to come back over other sites. It's still got a ways to go to be the "news king."

Nice to see Drudgereport and Kos on top, they are real news unlike CNN and MSNBC, Heck foxnews is just plain old Tabloid magazine, no better then the National Enquirer. THey make up huge headlines that usually have nothing to do with the stories and they embellish every truth they can find (even though they rarely look for the truth)

Do these stats take into account that Drudge has an auto-refresh built in to its html code? Doesn't such a feature boost the number of "hits" for a site?

go post dispatch!

Drudge links to this post using the headline: NIELSEN NAMES 'DRUDGE REPORT' MOST VISITED NEWS SITE ON TOP 30 LIST... The headline is not true because the data sorted by the number of sessions, per person, in a month. This is an indication of loyalty and/or engagement of a particular website brand.
As you can plainly see from the data, CNN has more unique visitors. In addition, if you multiply the number of sessions per person, by unique audience you get the following:
DrudgeReport: 19.9 * 3,445 (000) = 68,555 (000)
CNN: 7.9 * 37,181 (000) = 293,729 (000)
CNN is “visited” almost four and a half times Drudgereport.

Thanks, Wes. We're trying to find out from Nielsen how they take into account auto-refresh on news Web sites (as Winn and others pointed out earlier). For newspapers, though, it seems the final count is that the unique audience and total page views went up (year-over-year) and time spent on newspaper Web sites is stable -- both good things.

This is particularly interesting considering how plain and simple the Drudge site is on screen.

One interpretation is that people obviously go there because they get information they want, know it will be there, and care little to nothing for looks and fancy stuff that Web "designers" like to congratulate each other about...

True -- content brings people to Drudge, but it's important to give some attention to the "Drudge Effect," which is that he sends traffic to other Web sites soaring as well. We don't have a full-on study about this, but plenty of newspapers have noted it to us, and I'm sure it's true about other news sites as well. I don't think this is an either-or argument -- Drudge is doing well for itself, but it's also helping out other online media publishers. (Still waiting on the answer from Nielsen.)

I work a lot with web metrics. The industry refers to a ‘session’ as the time between a browser window open, until it closes.
So I do not think the auto-refresh tag manipulates the session metric since the browser window does not close.
However, I cross analyzed Drudgereport data with ComScore, Nielson, and other web metrics and discovered the following:
The average visitor to Drudgereport does not stay long. One reason could be that his site is mostly links to other sites, so the visitor disappears to other news articles.
So I looked at the sites that have a strong link relationship with him (e.g. sites that are more dependent on Drudge for traffic). I found that sites with a strong link relationship have a very low page views per visit ratio. This suggests that people just read the one story and go back to drudge. (on a side note, if smaller newspapers get the “drudge effect” – their best way to maximize traffic is to display a newsletter sign-up form for local visitors so they can re-engage with those visitors later.)
In addition, the amount of traffic going from drudgereport.com these sites, while very significant, is a small fraction of the total traffic. The rates are on par with untargeted links. We know that most links on Drudge are news related, so it doesn’t really make sense.
So I looked at referral data to Drudge Report. The most common type of traffic to Drudge Report is a direct hit. This means, people either type it directly or have their homepage set to Drudge Report.
The direct hit metric is very high, one of the highest I’ve seen. What is happening is there are a lot of people that have Drudge Report set as their homepage. So every time they open a browser window, he gets another session “hit” whether or not the visitor plans to engage with the drudgereport. However, even if they do not plan to engage with Drudge, I’m sure some headlines entice them with further reading. Regardless, making Drudge your home page is a strong indication of loyalty. However, I think the raw session data is a little skewed by so many people making the site their homepage.

Drudge numbers are at least 3-4 times their real number for they refresh every few seconds and you get counted again. I thought everyone knew this.

If you sort this by audience (isn't that the more meaningful criteria?) you get a very different list:CNN, Yahoo News, MSNBC, AOL & NY Times are the top 5. Drudge comes in at #16. Repeat usage is important context, but it's hardly the basis to sequence a list like this. Last I looked, we're all still selling based on audience and reach (and ocassionally clicks and ad impressions). Did I miss the memo on repeat readership?

As for the Drudge Effect ... The importance or lack of importance on that really depends on your website's focus. In a metro market, or any mass market, an eyeball is an eyeball and the more the merrier. At a local (or even hyperlocal) level, local readership is far more valuable and, to be honest, flipping Drudgies into the mix just muddies the data and makes it a little harder to keep one's eye on the local readership.

What about http://www.diversenews.com ?

GO DRUDGE! There is a reason that Time magazine's Mark Halperin noted that "Matt Drudge rules our world."

It is interesting to me that between the time I posted my question about auto-refresh and now, the direct link from Drudge to this page has been killed. The same headline now links to a Drudge Flash page, which encapsulates the above statistics. It's not all-out suppression since Drudge still provides links from the Flash page to this page, but it appears measures have been taken to diminish Drudge readership engagement with this comment thread.

Last I looked "data" was plural. Requires a plural verb.

Drudge isn't my home page, but it's one of my favorites. I use it daily, and read a good number of the linked articles. Is it to much to accept that Drudge has a good thing going and people like it?

Interesting list. Although I check Drudge and Fox daily, my favorite news site is not listed. For real news, nobody beats the BBC with its pages of content for every continent on the globe. Other than an occassional congressional scoop, I'm not sure why Drudge is king. The Fox site is great if you want details on the latest grisly death stories from around the US. Just my two cents worth!

So did Nielson actually consider the fact that the Drudge Report main page (read: *only* page) auto-reloads every 3 minutes?!?!? You think that might inflate the number of "sessions" per user for a site that does not issue unique session ID's? As a major website operator (and Drudge reader), I call B.S. on this stat.

Drudge only has an audience of 3million (about 1% of the US population). That's nothing. Then he has a page refresh javascript that makes each visit look like 20 visits. Scam.

The Buffalo News is doing a great job on the web. I have a friend who works at a local TV station and they are VERY nervous at what the news is doing -- and they hadn't been doing much for a long time.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of this data showing mobile users versus sedentary, such as iPhone and the like. This mobile access could play a significant role in marketing opportunities for the industry, with the use of Blue Tooth technology.