Drudge By Numbers: Gov’t Spends $71,433 Surfing Drudge Report In First 9 Days Of March
by Andrew Marcus
We noticed with amused curiosity, reports of an email circulating the digital halls of Congress warning staffers not to visit the Drudge Report for fear of viruses.
Senate Staffers Warned to Stay Clear of Drudge Report
The Senate’s official gatekeeper, said the Drudge Report, a conservative news aggregator, and whitepages.com “are responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate,” according to an e-mail to the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Drudge responded that his millions of other satisfied customers have had no complaints. He also revealed the following statistics:
“The site was seen 149,967 times since March 1st from users at senate.gov and 244,347 times at house.gov. [10,825 visits from the White House, eop.gov]” the Drudge Report wrote.
We made some very rough calculations and arrived at the following analysis:
149,967 Hits to Drudge from senate.gov since March 1 = 16,663 hits per day
244,347 Hits to Drudge from house.gov = 27,150 hits per day
If one spends just 30 seconds scanning headlines, that’s 139 hours per day of scanning headlines in the Senate. That requires 17 Senate staffers putting in a full 8 hour day.
In the House that’s 226 hours spent scanning Drudge, requiring 28 Staffers working 8 hour days.
What’s the total cost of government labor expended reading The Drudge Report in Congress? It depends on who’s scanning the headlines.
The Average Legislative Assistant in The House gets $37,321 Per Year (approximately $18.66 per hour). In The Senate the average is $48,276 (approximately $24.14 per hour) *these numbers assume a paid 2 week vacation. (Averages available here)
Estimate cost of Senate Drudge surfing: $3355
Estimate cost of House Drudge surfing: $4217
Estimate total cost of Congressional surfing of The Drudge Report: $7572 per day
As far as the White House goes, how much it costs depends upon whether a man or woman is scanning the Drudge headlines:
The White House logged 10,825 hits since March 1 which works out to 1203 Hits per day. At 30 second scans, that totals 10 Hours per day.
The average Female White House Staffer earns $72,956 per year ($36.48 per hour) while the average Male White House Staffer earns $82,346 per year ($41.17 per hour). *these numbers assume a paid 2 week vacation. (Averages available here)
A female Staffer earns $365 per day scanning Drudge.
A male Staffer earns $412 per day scanning Drudge.
That means if President Obama ordered only women White House Staffers to scan Drudge headlines, he could shave $17,155 off the Executive Branch’s Drudge budget per year. (as of July 2009)
Total cost per day of Legislative and Executive Branches in scanning Drudge Headlines: $7937
Estimate total cost of Congressional and Executive Branch labor devoted to reading the Drudge Report in the first 9 days of March 2010: $71,433**
At that pace, the Congress and White House will spend roughly $2.8 Million in tax payer dollars to surf The Drudge Report in all of 2010.
**(Conservatively estimated – all numbers double if the reader spends an average of 60 seconds reading Drudge)
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90 Comments
Well, the time spent reading Drudge is the only time Congress is not wasting.
Unfriggenbelievable! It has to be one of those WTF moments that will just hang there……….
First the White House declared War on FOX.
Now the Senate declares War on Drudge.
When will these people ever learn?
I can't wait for this to play out. While we wait, I have a question:
A female Staffer earns $365 per day scanning Drudge.
A male Staffer earns $412 per day scanning Drudge.
Why the pay difference?
Couldn't they cut costs, by having lowly Pages peruse Drudge?
They could allocate the time as "Educational Research".
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I seem to remember co-workers surfing the net for anything losing their jobs. Aint government work grand???
CL, the female staffers get $53 less a day, but are allowed to murder their unborn children. That makes it even in the eyes of the admin.
Aint government work grand?
GRANDIOSE!
Multiply this kind of activity by every single government office and tally up the cost! You can bet that surfing the net is a very common practice. I know for a fact it was in many DOD offices!
Those Commies are really concerned….no? This is more fun than Rahm poppin' a bonerr in the Congressional showers.
As far as the pay difference, Cowboy? That's Liberal Equality for All…..'member?
Won't work… They have proven to be incapable of learning.
Then using the other side of that argument, the male staffers getting paid more, that would be battle pay, eh? For getting into and warding off those "tickle fights" from Congressman Masa.
Did you hear that crash, and thud?
The crash was the sound of all those females banging their heads on the glass ceiling. The thud was the sound of their butts bouncing back up off the floor……..
The article is in error. Drudge's website automatically 'reloads' often. Each time it reloads, it registers as a 'hit.' If you load Drudge and leave the page open, it will register many, many hits. Retracto the Alpaca needs to get a clarification from Mr. Marcus here.
Too bad all the porn sites don't start dumping information online, as to how much time Government computers are logged into them………
I wonder how much Government time is spent viewing porn?
Funny." Porn" must trigger a filter here…………
P orn?
…and the FEAR and SHRIEKING surfing Drudge causes the Lying Leftists in D.C. is PRICELESS…!
Hey, the Democrats finally CREATED a new job! It's for a person to monitor and calculate the money our government spends for Senate staffers to surf DRUDGE.
LOL……….I love numbers, they can be soooooo entertaining,
when applied with imagination !
And you have the answer as to where the virueses are really coming from …
From the loony-left d-crat socialist dictionary: Drudge Report "virus" = THE TRUTH
That'll be the best $2.8 million dollars spent this year.
The Drudge Report has been my homepage for about the last decade……………………and I've never had a virus problem that I know of………………….Ever! Yet his website is responsible for "many viruses popping up throughout the Senate"? I'm calling bullshit. They don't want people seeking truth.
They better call in the surgeon general………………..to check out these viruses for them, because they're not related to surfing the Drudge Report.
Eh, I've had that happen on different sites, not all of them are political, either. Since none of my exhaustive virus scans have ever turned up anything afterward, I'm inclined to believe that the point is to get you to click the link in a panic and possibly add some adware.
That simply means that entire computers are left open to re-load the Drudge Report.
Progressives are so predictable. They must silence every dissenting voice. Welcome to the 21st century version of book burning.
Funny.
I made four posts, and they were all deleted until I figured hoe to get the word past the filter. The gist of the posts was simple. It would be hilarious for those type sites to start dumping information online, as to how many government minutes were spent online oggling that type site.
Now that would be an expose' that Larry Flynt would get a chuckle out of……….
Shhhh.
Please move quietly down the darkened corridor and quietly take your seat in Room 101…….
I have never had a problem
From the loony-left d-crat socialist dictionary: Drudge Report "virus" = THE TRUTH.
numberninenumberninenumbernine
Hey government! Better start watching the 'help wanted' sites instead. Come November you are history.
A few years ago i worked in the computer dept. of a major govt building in Atlanta. We had a big screen monitor set up that listed all active connections to the internet and websites that were being visited at that moment. Day after day these highly paid , overworked gov't employees spent hours visiting important work related web sites like Wal-Mart, or dating sites, adult sites, vacation travel. It was amazing how little work actually got done. Nothing like having to repair someones gov't issued laptop with 5 virus from visiting adult sites. and it was not just men. I do not think they need internet access in most jobs.
LOL!!! This would be funny if it wasn't my money being wasted. I don't mind them doing some surfing, but the caveat is that they first have to do their job and follow the constitutional guidelines. …and listen to the people.
At least we now know WHERE our hard earned tax dollars are going!! WTF!!!! A monkey could surf the web FOR FREE!!! This is the ultimate BIG BROTHER!!! I think it's time we seriously do something about this criminal administration!!! IMPEACH!!!
And to cover trips to the psychiatrist for counseling after seeing Rahm buck nekkid in the gym shower room.
grin
Funny.
Massa, tickle, homo, spade, and a host of others get through.
But P orn an col lards always gets me deleted. And mentioning Mooshelles broad wide feet……..
Thats funny. Going back to about 1995, Yahoo was about the only site. A ragtag newspaper in NC was the first to go online, and nobody knew what a search engine was, let alone what to use it for. We have come along way, and not always for the better.
Personally, I do not know what is worse, letting everyone waste time searching the web, or having them sit in their cube farms playing solotaire. Remmber back in the day, when every office you visited, there was some moron secretary sitting there, playing solitaire, and your presence was interrupting her game>
I've never had a dirty link from Drudge. If you have a scanning screen coming up that's not part of your known security suite, you're most likely infected with a trojan.
Equal work for equal pay
MMMM MMMM MMMM
NOT
WoW man.
You give me just a morsel, and I can run with it………..
First, ya cain't say "buck" nekkid with the current administration, any more than you can call a spade a spade.
Secondly, I wan't to know who took out the shower curtains? Did Bwarney Fwank have a heavy hand in it?
Thirdly, why isn't Dhasselhoff in here, screaming about Jews and Gentiles showering together?
I'm a tellin' ya, something just isn't Kosher in all this. What we really need is a little transparency. I can only hope someone will step forward and change this………..
Hey wait a minute……where's the CyberSecurity? Seems to me there were funds expended to protect from the infiltration of the ChiComs. Must be another, in yet, a long list of failed policies.
There's a HUGE flaw in how this is being calculated and considered.
Drudge uses a method for "auto refreshing". If you load up the page and let it sit a while you will notice that every so often it will auto-refresh the page to get new headlines.
When it does this, it counts as another "hit" even if the whole thing happened while nobody was at the computer. I think the "auto refresh" is something along the lines of once every 5-10 minutes. That means that someone who leaves the page up on their computer for a day and isn't even at it generates 144 and 288 "hits" per day. This is also how he generates his outrageous hit count numbers.
Take that into account and re-run the math, it's not quite so impressive.
Fear of viruses my ass! What kind of crappy security software are they using on the hill? I say an audit of govt computers is needed to see who's wasting taxpayer dollars on pr0n (as stated above, the usual culprit in hijacking cases).
Now there is a list I know people would pay for
But the reload interval is actually much longer than the 30 seconds per hit assumed by Retracto- in other words, he's underestimated the time they spend reading the site.
Then Drudge's time estimate of the time spent on the Drudge site is way, way too low, so the hours calculated will need to go way up?
HAHAHA!! Poor Mooshelle.
Sad to say it, but the security reports related to Drudge are true, though the malicious code is mostly from the advertisers, not him directly. If you think you have logged on to Drudge and have not been infected with anything, think again. Rootkits are generally invisible to most AV software. I'm not sure if politics motivated the Senate e-mail, all I know is that the fear is justified. Odd that Drudge would be singled out. One of the biggest offenders is blogspot.com, host of many political blogs on both sides of the aisle.
Drudge's site is rapidly reaching obsolescence. Oddly enough, Breitbart is taking his former mentor's place, along with others.
Don't get cocky, Twitter will take them down sooner than you think.
"col lards" ????
Wha-d-heck?
Someone has a problem with turnip greens?
Hey man, you changed your avatar. I like the new one!
What Drudge links push from time to time is "av.exe" which pops up a look-alike Windows Viruse alert. Google it for more.
My virus checker usually catches it, but didn't on the day of the Senate alert.
Probably a randomized push from some partisan company programmer that starts whenever the site picks up a incoming request from Drudge.
Drudge (and Hot Air and BigGovernment) shouldn't be shooting the messenger. Yes, I mentioned it to Drudge the day it happened.
I used it in a sentence months ago, with Mooshelle and her broad feet, and got banned from posting at Big Hollywood for three months. Talk about censorship.
Get a good popup blocker. The purpose is to get you to install a back door so they can turn your computer into a bot.
Considering the level of computer knowledge your post suggests, I would recommend switching to Ubunto.
The virus is actually a cure for the dreaded disease called CRIS (Cranial-Rectal Inversion Syndrome). Unfortunately for the progressives, once one starts reading Drudge, then one hears a "pop" and begins to see the light !!! Therefore the progressives must ban the cure and keep their people on the plantation.
No, that is actually a pop-up that simply claims a virus was found. The purpose is to get you to install malware.
(BTW, properly speaking, a "trojan" is just a wrapper that carries a payload. The payload can be a virus, backdoor, redirector, or even a joke program. One such joke program caused the mouse pointer to start wandering around the screen, another would change what some keys did when pressed, or installed that "Format C drive" screen saver. Some were fun.)
No, you guess again. That Windows malware doesn't affect me one bit.
av.exe is a nasty trojan (worm). If anyone has it, the following removal method works:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/rem...
I was worried that might be the culprit as this worm has been dropping its payload on a good number of PCs lately.
The best safe practice is browsing with Firefox and having the 'adblock' and 'noscript' extensions (I use adblock only).
Pretty silly.
Yeah, but not many know what I mean when I say "payload".
Hacks and joke programs can be fun as long as the prankee isn't running AV softs. I've loaded friend's with some that made system sounds into 'farts', kept logging them off and randomly ejected the optical drive. Funny stuff! (if you fix it for them, of course)
Boy would that be a Freedom of Info scandal or what?
Any guesses as to how many hits are in that category?
That may just be why nobody speaks out against the rubish going on in WDC – the IT folks have mined all the "nasty" sites and have IP addresses to prove it.
What's all the fuss about ?
After all, even "civil servants" need to take an occasional break from surfing "adult entertainment" sites …
Probably tons of queries/hits on tags apropos to this con-gress & administration along the lines of 'tickle fetish, twink, etc. ……..'
8 months til they are given notice. 9 months til they are gone.
For the last several months, the virus attached to the fake AV pop-up is the ZueS virus. This is a really, really nasty bug that often cannot be removed without a full wipe of the infected node (PC). ZueS is the virus that the British intel unwittingly infected themselves with through infected zip drives that were left around areas where Brit Intl officers were known to frequent.
Personally, I have never had any AV problems with Drudge. However, I have had this pop up at FOX nation, FOX news and several other sites. My suggestion is to use a good combo of AV software. I use Avast! (No, I don't work for Avast! LOL) for my real time protection and malwarebytes for stand alone scans. Avast! free version has built in root kit detection and removal tools.
Sadly, some of the best known paid AV software is virtually worthless anymore. I used to have Norton 360, but I routinely got infections that Avast!, AVG, or malwarebytes would pick out and fix, that Norton wouldn't even find.
It's important to note that this fake AV pop-up scan can be attached to almost any website or ad online.
If you happen to come across the fake AV scan pop-up you should immediately shut you router or modem off, put your PC into safe mode and run a full scan, just to be sure nothing got in. ( You should really run all your AV scans in safe mode).
None the less, you can encounter this pretty much anywhere in the Internet ether, so avoiding Drudge and the whitepages isn't really going to save you. A point I find it hard to believe the Senate Sargent at arms wasn't aware of…..
I'd rather have them surfing Drudge where they might learn something , then surfing porn which is what there are spending quite a lot of Tax Payer dollars doing now.
John Fund at WSJ recently had a piece about a study where there were thousands of man hours a month spent surfing porn just at the FEC alone.
Thanks
The money sent surfing Drudge came to a little over $71K. A good start! Now, how about spending some stimulus money and getting some real results. At this rate, we'll need just a little more to re-educate those left wing nut jobs who work for the guv-mint on the difference between democracy and socialism! Go Drudge!
The money sent surfing Drudge came to a little over $71K. A good start! Now, how about spending some stimulus money and getting some real results. At this rate, we'll need just a little more to re-educate those left wingers who work for the guv-mint on the difference between democracy and socialism! Go Drudge!
Wish I could get a copy of some of that. We have someone retiring and I would love to load that on their PC their last day of work.
PS, I'm the geek for the office.
The funniest was the old, gray haired lady who worked as an assistant for the main guy. Her fav website was something called youngblackstuds dot com. It would crack us up everytime we saw that scoll across the screen
I just want to say that : PRESIDENT OBAMA Frightens me! I know that he also frightens lots of the moms that
I speak to during the course of the week. He does not care about the American People nor the country. OBAMA only cares about himself and getting what he wants. He is certainly no decent leader.
Now THAT, is funny.
You wouldn't be referring to Nancy Pelosi, would you?
D@mn man! You mean I could be getting paid to check out Drudge?!?!? I chose the wrong line of work!
No, this was a NICE, grandmotherly type lady, not a bitter old shrew. lol
Pick on Drudge, Drudge picks back!!! Drudge is the virus to them, he's always lurking and they can't get rid of him!!!! If they have a secret he seems to always sleuth it out!! I'm just waiting for the Obama/Democrat Bomb, I'll be checking with Drudge frequently for first hand updates on the criminal activity going on in DC!!! These peoples emails/tapes/blackberrys/cellphones should be seized and searched, they are after-all "Public Officials" who have America under siege!!! The only thing they represent is their own desires!! The Nixon White House had a mole in it, why can't this one have one?
From the loony-left d-crat socialist dictionary: Drudge Report "virus" = THE TRUTH
Pr0n is an oldie which always works. There must be some new filters because everything I've posted this morning was deleted on submittal…. must be hyper-vigilance on B's part due to Massa, "tickle parties" and teh ghay.
collards? what have they got against leafy green vegetables?
[...] » Drudge By Numbers: Gov’t Spends $71,433 Surfing Drudge Report In First 9 Days Of March… [...]
The crappy security software made in China, no doubt!!
Thank you for letting us know. I'm assuming you wrote or have a hand in maintaining the code on Drudge's site?
Oh you don't?
Hmmm. I guess your claim is not quite so impressive.
Great user name!
Good News Amidst the Worst Economy in 75 Years!
[...] bogus statistics- A cost or a saving, you decide Drudge reported on the number of hits from the Senate, house and White house. from which the guy at the link above cooked up the following guesses: Quote: Estimate total cost [...]
Well, here's a pretty easy one to deal with:
http://www.instructables.com/id/%7BUpdated%7DHow-...
The pages are too busy servicing- I mean, serving- the Senators.
what about that whole equal pay for equal work deal?
I usually don’t post in weblogs but your blog drove me to it, impressive work..stunning!
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