The problem with studies claiming that the Drudge Report sends more traffic than Facebook and Twitter is that they don’t note that there’s only a small list of sites Drudge links to, and only so many links he puts up in a single day. If all Twitter users and Facebook users would all link to the same 50 articles in a single day — instead of linking to thousands upon thousands of articles — then the traffic they send would dwarf that of Drudge. Drudge is a firehose, whereas Facebook and Twitter are a collection of millions of people who will each send small bursts of traffic with every link they publish.
Simon Owens is a PR consultant and journalist. You can read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or email him at [email protected]