Drudge Report inflates traffic stats, deceives advertisers | Personal Democracy ForumIt appears that Matt Drudge is artificially inflating his traffic statistics by using a small bit of HTML, specifically this piece of HTML: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="175". If you don't happen to be a web geek like me you may not know that causes the site to refresh itself completely every 175 seconds (2 minutes and 55 seconds). As the Valley Wag article notes this is sometimes done by large news organizations to make sure readers are getting the freshest headlines.
Aside from this refresh rate being far more aggressive than any other news organization out there it is also highly deceptive both in terms of claiming influence and in terms of advertising revenue. Matt Drudge employs a CPM model for his advertisements (view his rate sheet), and his web site is widely perceived to be influential because of his reported traffic numbers. Additionally, new ads are served with each page refresh.