Drudge By Numbers: Gov’t Spends $71,433 Surfing Drudge Report In First 9 Days Of March

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.

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