Interesting Take

John Hawkins on Drudge's practice of not linking to blogs:

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, Ace hammers Matt Drudge for waiting until a story broken by a blogger was picked up by a local paper to link it:

"Drudge almost never links bloggers; it's just a thing with him. So he waited until a local Arizona paper basically just retyped espressopundit.com's posting and then interviewed him (with espressopundit.com "quoted" saying pretty much the same damn things on his website).

So why couldn't Drudge have just linked espressopundit? If he's such a big damn believer in the new media "Manifesto," why is it so important to him to get the Old Media's imprimatur on a story before running it?

Eh. Whatever. I guess he's struggling for respectability himself and can't risk linking those outlaw bloggers too often."

This is a common criticism of Drudge and who knows? Maybe he doesn't like bloggers. He certainly has loudly objected in the past when he has been called a blogger.

However, my guess is that there's a simpler reason that Drudge doesn't link blogs very often: he's so enormous that we can't handle the traffic he sends.

You're talking about a website that cracks 10 million hits a day M-F and the readers are there to click links. How many blogs out there can actually handle getting, let's say, 30k, 40k, or 50k hits in an hour from Drudge? The truth is that most of us can't. 95% of the blogs out there probably couldn't take 10 minutes of the sort of traffic a Drudge link provides before we'd be knocked offline. And let's face it: if you're Drudge, what's the point of linking somewhere that will be offline shortly after you link?

So, it's probably not personal, it's business. He's in the business of providing working links and because of that, it's understandable that he'd want to try to stick to bigger websites that can handle the load whenever possible.