Gandhi’s Law: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Drudge’s Addendum: After which they buy you out and undo everything you accomplished.
The Drudge Report’s drift from its original Internet rebelliousness took another step into mainstream irrelevance with a purge this week of links to pioneering conservative sites The Gateway Pundit, World Net Daily, Free Republic, Daily Wire and Western Journal, and Lucianne.com. Also reportedly gone are links to the late Rush Limbaugh’s site and columnist David Limbaugh.
Infowars and ZeroHedge survived the purge, however one report observed ZeroHedge was delisted for a time this week.
The Drudge Report has gone through a sharp change in recent years leading to speculation about whether reclusive owner-editor Matt Drudge secretly sold the site and relinquished control. Regardless, the site is not what it used to be and has lost substantial traffic.
Last month the Press Gazette reported the Drudge Report lost over forty percent of its traffic year-on-year from February 2020 to February 2021, “Influential conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} from 71.4 million to 42.4 million.”
This is why the entrepreneur’s dream of being acquired or going public is so ultimately futile. Because unless you’re creating something purely for the love of filthy lucre, selling out is going to destroy what you created. The more effective and beautiful your creation, the more demand there will be to subvert it, if not entirely invert it.
Joseph Farah of WND saw it coming.
In the early days, WND had the distinguished honor of having more links back on Drudge than any other website. Joseph Farah was the second one. How did I achieve it way back in the ’90s? I simply asked for it. Yes, Drudge and I had a real relationship. That’s how I knew in recent years that it wasn’t Drudge in charge. He sold it – or sold out.
Fortunately, there is still Infogalactic News for all your daily aggregated news links.