WHERE IN THE WEB IS MATT DRUDGE?!
His cyber hub is drifting leftward & he’s gone MIA
IT was the kind of story that would once have had Matt Drudge deploying font sizes that newspapers used to reserve for declarations of war. On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from spreading a New York Post article alleging that Hunter Biden had brokered meetings between his father, then the vice president of the United States, and executives at a Ukrainian energy firm where the younger Biden held an $80,000-a-month sinecure.
Yet the controversy over tech companies restricting the spread of a story unflattering to the Democratic presidential contender was nowhere to be seen in the upper half of The Drudge Report — once the most coveted and agenda-setting Web real estate in right-of-center media.
“People have noticed that Drudge has basically become a liberal site over the past two years,” a senior figure in conservative media told me that week.
“Liberal” might be a stretch, but it’s hard to argue with the claim that The Drudge Report has changed over the past few years. At the very least, it became an antiTrump site. “YOU’RE FIRED!,” the top story on Drudge read on Nov. 7 when Joe Biden’s Electoral College win was first projected. During the campaign, the site had touted any and all bad news for Drudge’s once-preferred candidate — a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the Media Critic in Chief.
“Our people have all left Drudge,” the president tweeted on Sept. 14. “He is a confused mess.”
Drudge has always been an enigma, but aspects of Trump’s critique appear to be accurate. The Drudge Report once cycled through 40 to 50 links in a single five-hour period. The page is now updated only once or twice a day and almost never reacts to breaking news, as if it’s being run by someone who simply doesn’t care anymore. Traffic has reportedly lagged, with Comscore data suggesting a 45 percent plunge in the year before this past September. In the glory days even a mid-page Drudge link could pull a million views; the number is now down to the high tens of thousands.
And unlike in past years, when the page had multiple staffers working morning and afternoon shifts, Drudge watchers have no idea who, if anyone else, works for the site. The last reported employee was Daniel Halper, a former Weekly Standard editor hired on in 2017, although it is unclear whether he still works there. When contacted, Halper would not comment on any past or current involvement with The Drudge Report.
In interviews with more than a halfdozen various former Drudge associates, about half suggested that the site may no longer be under his control. For these people, politics alone couldn’t explain all the changes at the site. The oddball stories about sex robots and exorcisms, and the obsession with weather events, are all almost entirely gone, along with any pretense to original reporting.
One former confidante remembered a common story about Matt Drudge: In the early 2010s, he fantasized that he would keep the DrudgeReport.com domain forever, and that the site would simply go black one day without explanation. Others asserted that Drudge, reportedly a globetrotting lover of expensive cars, hotels, and real estate, actually would sell for the right amount. Two floated the theory that the site had been bought by a liberal billionaire.
One of the few ex-Drudge associates who would discuss him on-record was New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who said she had not spoken with Drudge in over five years. She believes he no longer runs the site. “It’s a totally different publication,” she told me. What was the biggest sign? I asked. “Oh, every line of the page,” she replied. “It’s just so obvious that he’s not interested, that somebody else is doing it.” (Drudge himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
NO one really knows why the oncemighty Drudge Report has changed so much. But some clues exist. According to an article in New York magazine, Matt’s father, Bob Drudge — a Maryland social worker who started an AOL-era Web site called Refdesk — sometimes seemed to resent his depressive and occasionally delinquent son, whose life he turned around by buying him a Packard Bell computer in 1994.
With that computer, Drudge started a popular newsletter buoyed in part by information he’d dig out of trash cans near his job at the gift shop at CBS studios in Los Angeles. In 1998, he reported that Newsweek had spiked an article about an extramarital affair between Bill Clinton and a White House intern. Being first to a story that resulted in the impeachment of a president was a mere entree: In the 2000s, The Drudge Report became the only news aggregator that absolutely everyone read.
Drudge’s political beliefs have always been a subject of speculation. Insomuch as Drudge has any clear convictions, they involve an intense suspicion of concentrated power and the glorification of his own free will. In the closest Drudge has come to a mission statement since the early 2000s, he described his Web site as “a correction to this groupthink.”
Drudge was an early backer of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and had reportedly been shepherded through the White House by Jared Kushner. In early 2017, when Drudge and Trump were still on good terms, the news maven’s father sold his Web site to a California couple, Margaret and Adrian Otto.
According to her LinkedIn page, Margaret Otto resides in Mountain View, Calif. Adrian Otto is currently the technical director of the office of the chief technical officer at Google, where he helps design and maintain the Web giant’s cloud computing systems.
As BuzzFeed reported last year, an archived version of the Web site for HA Hosting, a company Adrian founded and that both Ottos managed, boasted in 2005 that it maintained the servers for the Drudge Report, helping the site to withstand a surge of 36 million unique visitors on election day in 2004. According to a source with first-hand familiarity with The Drudge Report’s operations, Adrian continued to serve as the site’s de facto webmaster as late as 2019.
In the summer of 2019, Drudge abruptly ended his relationship with Intermarkets, a Virginia-based Web marketing firm and the only ad broker his site had ever used. He replaced it with a company called Granite Cubed, whose California corporate filings
listed Margaret Otto, the owner of Refdesk, as the entity’s CEO, secretary, chief financial officer, and director. Drudge provided his former ad broker with no explanation for the move and was similarly tight-lipped with Otto. “I have no idea, actually,” she told me when asked why Drudge hired her company. “It was very sudden and yeah, I was never informed as to any details.”
Otto was vague in addressing the question of whether it was at least notable that she’d ended up deeply enmeshed in both of the Drudges’ Web sites. Subsequent attempts to reach her again by phone and e-mail were unsuccessful.
ADVERTISING on one of the world’s most-trafficked news Web sites was suddenly the responsibility of a oneperson shop run by a person who had no apparent experience in the complex world of online advertising but who served as the owner and operator of Bob Drudge’s Web site and whose husband had longstanding ties to The Drudge Report. Otto’s advertising company eventually changed its name to Voranda, and has only one other listed employee on LinkedIn, aside from Otto. That person worked in digital marketing at the conservative Web site World Net Daily for eight years, according to LinkedIn.
Otto is one person close to Matt Drudge who vouches on-record for him still having an active role in The Drudge Report, though she said she doesn’t know who, if anyone, still works at the site. “He’s doing a great job, however he manages it,” she said.
The Ottos’ Drudge connection is both personal and mysterious: Margaret was active in the Junior League of Los Angeles, and was on the board of the FBI Los Angeles Citizens Academy Alumni Association. There is no hint of a political agenda or of any malfeasance or graft in either her or her husband’s background — although there isn’t much of a hint of an interest in Web advertising, either.
A number of oddities in The Drudge Report’s advertising practices were found in an analysis by Rocky Moss, CEO of DeepSee, whose company helps Web advertisers detect fraudulent practices among online publishers. In mid-October, Moss discovered that The Drudge Report was running a script that would load advertisements that do not render on the site’s publicly visible page. The advertisers, who are almost always represented by computer programs that make lightning-fast automated bids on available Web real estate, are paying to place ads that a user simply never sees.
The Drudge Report’s revenue stands at somewhere between $9 million and $30 million over the previous year, BuzzFeed reported in 2019. The hidden ads and recent history of inflating ad impression numbers — even if not illegal — point to a once highly influential news operation whose highest concern is now the extraction of monetary value from its audience.
Some of The Drudge Report’s unusual activity appears to have begun within the past four months — the hidden ads first showed up in early August. Drudge’s disenchantment with Trump predates these changes. Perhaps The Drudge Report’s new ad broker wanted to cash in on higher traffic during the stretch run of the presidential election. Or — if there’s any truth to the rumors — maybe its new owners did.
DRUDGE would be under no obligation to disclose a new owner — a former confidante speculated that if The Drudge Report ever sold, the only two people who would know about it would be Drudge and his buyer. One possibility is that Drudge has remained the site’s owner on paper while the meaningful decisions are made elsewhere. The Ottos might not own both The Drudge Report and Refdesk, but they have a great deal of potential control over how both sites operate, along with valuable information about their audiences.
Even now, The Drudge Report is an information bonanza. Traffic may be down, but the site still claims tens of millions of daily visitors, on par with major news networks and newspapers. The question is: Whose bonanza is it?
I asked Lucianne Goldberg if Drudge’s old friends ever speculate about where he might be. “Gone,” she said. Not gone in the sense of dead, she quickly clarified. “Gone” in the sense of finished with his old life: “I think he was a little surprised he made it as far as he did, and that he was as quote ‘ important’ to the general press scene as he was . . . He had a cool operation. He didn’t have to work very hard, went swimming once a day in the ocean, and he liked going to parties. And he liked his hat.”
Multiple former acquaintances of Drudge’s theorize that his disappointment with Trump is sincere, and similar to that of his friend Ann Coulter’s: Both turned on the president because of his unseriousness in pursuing their agenda, particularly the construction of a US-Mexico border wall. Drudge is famous for discarding friends over forgotten or half-invented slights, according to both news accounts like the New York magazine profile and to several former acquaintances who still aren’t quite sure why the web publisher cut them out of his life. In the greatest possible demonstration of his jealously guarded independence, Drudge may have done the same thing to a president of the United States whose White House he could freely crash.
Maybe Drudge decided he was sick of it being a right-wing firebrand — and perhaps this was a wise move. Twenty-five years into his career, Drudge, by having effectively disappeared, has become an object of fascination rather than scorn.
Tracy Sefl is one of the most unexpected of the former Drudge acquaintances. A professional Democrat who spent years working to advance the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, Sefl proved successful in placing stories during the 2008 campaign, during which Drudge emerged as an affable adversary. “What I have to imagine is that there’s no joy in it anymore for Matt,” she said. “And that may be what it comes down to. What fun is it anymore to follow all of this for someone who’s been doing it as long as he has, someone who’s ridden the roller coasters that he helped build? What fun is it in 2020 to be mucking around in these news cycles?”
Sefl believed that Drudge was never all that political. He cared about “personalities — personalities of the principals, the candidates, the elected officials, personalities in media. He was attuned to those. He had opinions about them. I imagine he still does.”
He had few rooting interests outside of himself. “I’ve never believed that he has a side that is a partisan side,” Sefl said. “His side is capitalism.”
Whether through a payday, political apathy, or a newfound slackerdom, Drudge might have actually pulled off everyone’s dream: making bank and then logging off.