The History and Evolution of Drudge Report: A Comprehensive Guide

[240B]

The History and Evolution of Drudge Report: A Comprehensive Guide

Reference.com
by Staff Writer
May 10, 2024

The Drudge Report, also known as drudgereport.com, is a popular news aggregation website that has been a significant player in the online media landscape for over two decades. Founded by Matt Drudge in 1996, this groundbreaking platform has revolutionized the way news is consumed and disseminated. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the history and evolution of Drudge Report, exploring its rise to prominence and its impact on modern journalism.

The Birth of Drudge Report
In the mid-1990s, the internet was still in its infancy, and traditional media outlets dominated the news landscape. However, Matt Drudge saw an opportunity to disrupt this status quo by creating an alternative platform that would challenge mainstream media narratives. With his background in radio and journalism, Drudge launched the Drudge Report as a simple email newsletter.

Initially covering gossip and rumors from Hollywood and Washington D.C., the newsletter quickly gained popularity due to its unfiltered content and insider scoops. As traffic to his website grew exponentially, it became clear that Drudge had tapped into a demand for alternative news sources that offered a different perspective from traditional media outlets.

(more)
https://www.reference.com/world-view/history-evolution-drudge-report-comprehensive-guide

(also with more detail)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report

[massadvj]

Not comprehensive at all. No mention of the fact that no one reads it anymore.

[240B]

Years ago the Drudge Report was an equal opportunity political bashing machine. In fact if anything it was a Right-leaning site. The Drudge Report was banned in Washington D.C. for government employees. The site was considered by Liberal politicians of the time to be a Rightwing bomb-throwing site. This changed somewhere around 2019 when Trump became President.

Visiting Drudge Report over the last year has convinced me, at least, that the site has flipped to the far-Left. Lately, EVERY mention of Trump is either outright negative or is couched in some kind of neurotic breakdown, (Trump is furious!, Trump is jealous!, Trump is struggling!, Trump is flailing!, Trump is scared!, et al). Every mention of formerly Biden, and of course now Kamala, is dripping with praise like a honeycomb. There can be no question that Drudge Report has become a NeverTrump website which is determined to damage Trump and to elect Kamala. Objectivity and basic 'News', has nothing to do with the site anymore. Not to mention how many of the Drudge links lead to subscription only websites.

This year and now since Biden was forced out and Kamala was installed, the Drudge Report has become an unofficial Kamala campaign website. The overwhelming support for Kamala combined with the incessantly negative portrayal of anything Trump and anything Republican, makes the site an offshoot of the DNC/Democrat campaign platform for Kamala.

I still look at it once in a while because the site tends to carry offshoot esoteric stories of interest from around the world. But other than that, the site is useless to me. I have to ignore all of the political links (which is the majority of the site) knowing that they are all heavily biased in favor of the Democrat Party. In one man's opinion, I no longer trust this site to report fairly or to report 'truth'. I only use it for quirky little articles which are hard to find elsewhere. As far as real election news, I will go somewhere a little more grounded than Drudge Report.

[240B]

Not comprehensive at all. No mention of the fact that no one reads it anymore.

@massadvj

I noticed that too. In fact the original article was so flimsy, I included the Wiki article just to give it a little more meat.

[Cyber Liberty]

Not comprehensive at all. No mention of the fact that no one reads it anymore.

The primary cause of that is they steered hard a-port and now suck as desperately as MSNBC.

[roamer_1]

https://thelibertydaily.com/

[Timber Rattler]

The primary cause of that is they steered hard a-port and now suck as desperately as MSNBC.

Word on the web is that Drudge quietly sold it to Margaret Otto in 2018. She's a Leftist and changed the site's direction after she bought it.

Matt Drudge Logs Off

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/matt-drudge-logs-off

In early 2017, when Drudge and Trump were still on good terms, the news maven’s father, Bob Drudge, sold his website, Refdesk.com, to a California couple. A dry-as-dust compendium of web-based research tools, Refdesk had its moment of fame during the early Bush years when The New York Times reported that it was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s favorite website. According to filings on the Maryland secretary of state’s website, Refdesk was transferred to Margaret and Adrian Otto, both identified as “director and manager of Refdesk Holdings, LLC,” that January. The California corporation that would assume ownership, the aforementioned Refdesk Holdings, Inc., had been registered in California in December of 2016.

According to her LinkedIn page, Margaret Otto resides in Mountain View, California, the Silicon Valley gold coast town that is home to Google, LinkedIn, and other tech giants. Mountain View is hardly a right-wing bastion—Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, is a Democratic Party megadonor. It turns out that Drudge’s connections to the big tech “hell pit” are personal. Margaret’s husband, 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. Adrian’s Drudge association goes back to the very beginning, according to Margaret: “That was 25 years ago, probably,” she said when asked about her husband’s involvement with The Drudge Report.

As Buzzfeed reported last year, an archived version of the website for HA Hosting, a company Adrian Otto 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. Otto was also responsible for hosting Andrew Breitbart’s website and was thanked in one of the late Drudge assistant’s books. According to a source with first-hand familiarity with The Drudge Report’s operations, Adrian Otto continued to serve as the site’s de facto webmaster as late as 2019, overseeing its connection to the internet, communicating with its Japan-based developer, and addressing various back-end issues. A reference to an “Adrian” still shows up in the Drudge Report’s source code, at the very bottom of the page: “<!-- END -- DO NOT REMOVE THIS LINE --Adrian --!>” (based on a search of the Wayback Machine, this line first appeared in 2009).

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 said when asked why Drudge hired her company. “It was very sudden and yeah, I was never informed as to any details.”

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