Drudge scams advertisers, traffic stats inflated

I noticed a very interesting item over at ValleyWag today about the Drudge Report's traffic stats.  Translation, Matt Drudge is scamming his advertisers! (Note: for those of you that haven't read this site, it is basically a gossip rag for the Silicon Valley, but stick with me)

Advertising rates are generally set based on how many impressions of an ad you offer (see CPM).  In web terms this translates to page views.  As the number of page views on your site goes up you can charge more for your ads.

So how is Drudge scamming his advertisers?  Follow me over the fold and I'll explain.

That valley wag article contains a nice little chart that shows the number of refreshes per hour for various news sites.  As you can see Drudge has his auto-refresh settings set twice as high as the next most aggressive news organizations, The Washington Post and Reuters.

If you view the source for Drudge's page you'll see a little bit of HTML at the top: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="175"

What does that mean?  It means that every 175 seconds (2 minutes and 55 seconds) the homepage for Drudge Report automatically refreshes whether you have asked it to or not.  And we're talking the whole homepage here, not little refreshes due to AJAX like we have here at DailyKos.

What that effectively means is that if you have The Drudge Report open in your browser it is going to refresh roughly 20 times in an hour.  If the readers of Drudge's site are like myself and probably a lot of other DailyKos readers that means that they probably have a window with his site open most of the day and go back to check every so often.  

That behavior would lead to inflated page view numbers for the site as a whole.  Drudge claims to get 20M+ page views on a daily basis, exactly how many of those are due to this little trick is difficult to determine, but I'd be willing to wager that a significant percentage of them are.

Those artificial page views result in more "impressions" of the ads his site serves technically, which leads to his advertisers paying more for less actual value.

So if you want to take Drudge down a peg or two hit him where it hurts--in the wallet.  Let his advertisers know they aren't getting their money's worth.

Update: Here's a link to his rate sheet.  I also noticed that he has a system setup such that the ads change with each page refresh.  That means that advertisers are paying for impressions that no one sees at inflated rates due to bogus traffic.