Business 2.0 writes about how Matt Drudge’s news portal makes him over USD 800K per annum. Its an aggregation model, one which we used in Samachar. Drudge goes much further – we used to give links to established news sources, while Drudge ferrets out the hot stories and scoops also through his network of sources. The lesson: nanopublishing can work.
Drudge’s minimalist approach dates to 1995, when he noticed that people posting on Usenet often scooped the networks. “Matt and I spent hours talking about how slow the big boys were in breaking news,” recalls Harry Knowles, the founder of movie site Ain’t It Cool News. “I remember Matt saying to me, ‘The Internet is going to be the thing that knocks off CNN.'”
“There is always this feeling that Drudge is about to break something,” says Phil Boyce, program director at WABC radio in New York. That leads many loyal readers to check the site 10 to 15 times a day. That drawing power has turned Drudge into one of the Net’s biggest traffic generators.
