I found two bits of information about recentish changes at Drudge:

Zitat

---

If you've noticed that @DRUDGE_REPORT isn't the same any more, you're not alone.

A friend writes:

"Ron, what is going on with @DRUDGE and his recently ending his decade long independent advertising agency for his website?

******

Zitat

---

"He recently signed on with a Google affiliated company, which purchased Matt Drudge’s father’s website, RefDesk, as part of the deal.

"Frankly, I’m concerned this is the sole reason Drudge went mainstream and to the left: to satisfy his new advertising agency. >
10 replies 106 retweets 191 likes

---

https://twitter.com/RonColeman/status/1179897531200917505

---

Matt Drudge Has Barely Changed Anything About The Drudge Report In The Last 20 Years. This Summer, He Upended Its Advertising Business.
A change to the secretive publisher’s business has revealed new details about his operation and is attracting scrutiny from the ad industry.
Craig Silverman
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 15, 2019, at 5:23 p.m. ET

The Drudge Report, with its Web 1.0 design offering a single page of links, is one of the enduring internet media business success stories. Two decades after rising to prominence for breaking news of the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair, it remains one of the most popular websites in the United States and a key source of right-wing ideas for its readers, including President Donald Trump.

Owner Matt Drudge is also still adept at attracting attention, such as last week when his was the only major news site to post the El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter’s manifesto. But the site has always resisted the temptation to build anything beyond the simplest business of selling display advertising on a single homepage.

Now, Drudge has quietly flipped the switch on perhaps the biggest change he’s ever made: He’s ditched his longtime advertising partner for a new representative, in the process revealing new details about his business and attracting scrutiny of how his site operates.

The reclusive publisher does not disclose revenue figures, but estimates put the site’s annual haul well into the realm of millions of dollars per year. Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence platform, estimates that over the past 12 months the site generated more than $30 million in ad revenue. Another estimate from the Global Disinformation Index, to be published in a report next month, pegs revenue at $9 million per year.

In a surprising turn, Drudge Report removed ads between the end of May and mid-July, according to Danny Rogers, a cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, a project that’s analyzing domains to generate “risk ratings of the world’s media sites.” After noticing an absence of ads on Drudge around May 31, “we didn’t see any ads on Drudge until about July 12,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News.

During that period, Drudge cast off his advertising representative of close to 20 years, Intermarkets, in favor of a new and unknown company, Granite Cubed. It has no record in the digital ad industry, was only registered as a company in March of this year, and lists no staff or owners on its websites. Yet it just landed one of the biggest websites in the US.

......................................................

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/cra...port-ad-revenue