Matt Drudge's $1.2 Million

On Monday, the Miami Herald profiled local resident Matt Drudge, who claims to earn US$1.2 million in advertising revenue from his Web site.

Its ads are sold by Intermarkets, an agency that also sells banner for The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village Voice, and other sites. The banner ads costs $3 per thousand impressions or $4,400 a day (discounted to $29,000 a week). Drudge claims that his site received nearly 6.5 million visitors during the average day in August and had 163 million in the preceding 31 days. After Intermarket’s commission, the ad revenue is almost pure profit for Drudge. The site costs only about $4,000 a month to run.

Most journalists’ reactions to Drudge are similar to those of J.D. Lasica’s.

Lasica and Drudge are correct in that Drudge isn’t a journalist. We believe that he is an entertainer, or what Drudge refers to as “newsman”. He’s the counterman who slices up and serves a commodity — in his case, hyperlinks to news & opinion Web sites. Much of what he serves up might be baloney, but he’s gotten rich running an online delicatessen of the news.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.