- I was perusing the Drudge page over the top of the hour break.
Man, the Drudge page. Depending on the time you look at it, I mean, it makes it look like this country’s finished, we’re done, it’s over. You may as well forget about it and just enjoy your life.
- Drudge went “all in on Trump during the [2016] election.”
“That was three years ago,” the founder of the aggregate website responded. Norman noted that Drudge’s “response seemed rather telling, a clear distancing from the president.”
Trump has noticed Drudge’s apparent shift, according to a report in the Daily Beast published last November. Trump asked, “What’s going on with Drudge?” according to a person familiar with his private remarks. Trump also asked Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a top administration official, to contact him to repair the relationship, but it’s unclear if Kushner did.
Yet a new question has recently arisen, “Does Matt Drudge still own his website?” The answer is seemingly: NO! Buzzfeed News dug deeper:
- Since November, the links on the Drudge Report have sent roughly 8 million pageviews to the [dnyuz.com] site, according to data from analytics service SimilarWeb. This has likely earned significant revenue for its owner, who has taken steps to hide their identity. The success of dnyuz.com is yet another example of how Google, which provides the ads that make the site’s money, allows webpages that copy content from real publishers to reap ad dollars. At the same time, the news industry is hemorrhaging jobs and revenue.
A post on May 24 on the scammer-tracking site hucksters.net identified the site’s owner as Hayk Karapetyan, a web developer living in Armenia. BuzzFeed News came to the same conclusion based on domain registration records, Domain Name System data, and dnyuz.com’s use of the same Google AdSense ID number as other sites currently or previously owned by Karapetyan.
The Drudge Report began linking to dnyuz.com as early as November 2019, according to data from SEMRush, a search analytics tool. The links have been a consistent presence on the site since. Neither Karapetyan nor Matt Drudge responded to requests for comment.
Now that it appears he has walked off his job, who will take his place?
FULL STORY