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Valleywag to Drudge: Thanks for the “load”

Valleywag reports that Matt Drudge has published his best month of stats yet - 425,371,511 “loads” for the month of March. Unfortunately, “loads” refers to each time the Drudge Report home page has been loaded; and unfortunately, Druge has an innocuous meta tag at the top of their page (check the code your self to verify):

<META HTTP-EQUIV=“refresh” content=“180″>

Yes, that snippet reloads the DrudgeReport in your browser every 180 seconds without fail, whether anyone’s in front of your computer or not. What does that mean for Drudge’s reported numbers? Well - without a robust public stats solution, its impossible to say. We can make some inferences and assumptions based on the numbers Drudge does report, however:

Divide that 425,371,511 by 31 = ~13.8 million loads/day.

Ok - that daily number must be the product of the following:

(Unique Visitors) + (Return Visits) + (Idle Refreshes) = Daily Visits

Assumption #1: Each Drudge fan checks the site 5x during a day. The first visit would identify them as a unique for that day, leaving 4 subsequent visits. Ok, my algebra is a little shaky here, but here’s a revised formula.

[(1) + (4) + (Idle Refreshes)] x (# of Drudge fans) = 13.8M

Now - let’s assume that the average Drudge fan leaves their PC on with the Drudge Report loaded during lunch hour and during dinner and LOST - that’s 3 hours, or 180 minutes, which by virtue of Drudge’s meta tag, yeilds 60 loads:

[(1) + (4) + (60)] x (# of fans) = 13.8M

So - 13.8M / 65 = ~212,000 uniques. Multiply uniques by the “legit” pageviews in this example (4 + 1 = 5), and you’ve got ~1.1 M page views.

Ok, so my numbers are the most blatant of random estimates. But the point is that plugging some random numbers into the equation really shows the power of that meta-refresh tag to inflate Drudge’s stats.

You can fool around with your own numbers: I put together a Google Sheet with the equation described above, feel free to plug in your own numbers and see what pops out. Click here to get to the sheet.

EDIT: I’ve never shared a GSheet before, so if its funged up, comment and I’ll try to fix it.

clickfraud, drudge stats

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