His popularity grew with that of the Internet, and Drudge soon developed a following in the tens of thousands, especially among journalists.
Two years earlier, Drudge had started posting various news items and gossip-mostly early reports of weekend movie grosses along with occasional news of show business contract disputes-on the fledgling World Wide Web. In late June 1997, Matt Drudge visited Washington at a time when his celebrity was still rather modest. Three years later, Drudge would eclipse that news story with a political bombshell-breaking news of Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.Īhead, a closer look at Drudge’s real-life beginnings and his role in making Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair the scandal spectacular that it became. The character is lit and scripted like a screen villain-perhaps not surprising, given the show’s creators have said the true crime of Impeachment is the way Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones were maligned by media.ĭuring the five-minute opening sequence, Drudge locks up the gift shop, throws on a trench coat, digs sensitive information out from a studio dumpster, and returns to his small, drab apartment to publish the biggest scoop of his career at that point: Jerry Seinfeld’s negotiations for $1 million per episode. In the episode’s opening scene, set in 1995, Drudge (played by Billy Eichner) manages the gift shop at CBS Studios. The character does not get an introduction so much as a down-and-dirty origin story. What’s more, Drudge Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to which it drove traffic.Matt Drudge makes a dramatic debut in Impeachment: American Crime Story’s third episode, “Not to Be Believed,” which premieres Tuesday night on FX. In other words, the Drudge Report’s influence cuts across both traditional organizations such as ABC News to more tabloid style outlets such as the New York Post. While Facebook never drove more than 8% of traffic to any one site, for instance, provided more than 30% of traffic to .uk (the British newspaper site the Daily Mail), 19% of the traffic to the, 15% to and 11% to and. In some cases, is an extremely important traffic driver. And, more striking, it ranked second or third in more than half (12), outpacing Facebook. The Drudge Report ranked as a driver of traffic to all but six of the top sites studied.
Two decades later, while Drudge is still a small scale operation, it remains, according to the data, an influential driver of traffic to top news sites. The site, founded by Matt Drudge, first gained national recognition during the Clinton presidency for posting insider information about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Before Google or Facebook, an early major driver of Internet traffic was the Drudge Report.
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