Drudge Report is a site that can only be described as the exception that proves the rules we are supposed to live by, it’s a crappy looking site (sharing the worst looking website honor with Craigslist) that predominately links to other peoples content and it has never changed. Run by a couple of guys at most, the site is essentially Matt Drudge.

Traffic is over 700 million page views a month but because of the aggressive reloading I am not sure how reliable that number is but it’s generally considered accurate that the site gets at least 5 million unique visitors a month. At any rate, the ability to generate an enormous traffic surge to a linked item is the stuff of legend.

What does all this prove, not much I suppose other than you find success in interesting places and not always according to the script we are given. Drudge works because the site has enormous utility and site visitors are willing to overlook the visual issues for what counts, the content (or in this case the links to content). News aggregation is still a huge business, it would be a mistake for anyone to suggest that this segment of media is blown up as a result of changing behaviors due to social networks and their ilk.

Then there is Drudge on Twitter… as you can see from the screenshot, Drudge is not exactly into conversation… breaking more rules.