Drudge Report Is Worth as Much as The Washington Post

The general estimate is that Drudge’s site, run by two people, is worth about what Bezos paid for The Washington Post: $250 million. It may be worth more. He owns all of it.

Drudge is a conservative. The liberal reporters who dismissed Drudge as an amateur back in 1998, when he scooped the industry with his report on the Lewinsky affair are in new lines of work. Who’s got the last laugh now?[amazon asin=B008EN462I&template=*lrc ad (right)]

As soon as it was announced that The Washington Post would be bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, shares rose by 5%. This means that investors trust the abilities of a man with zero experience in running a newspaper more than they trusted the liberal family that owned the paper for four generations. This was a vote of “no confidence” against the existing owners.

It means that investors had already figured out that the newspaper was headed for oblivion. They could see that nothing that the Graham family had done in two decades had reversed the fiscal bloodletting. The newspaper had been worth billions back then. The whole deal will fetch only $250 million today.

Shares did not rise 10% or 20%. Investors are still not convinced that Bezos can reverse the decline. But there is at least some hope that a man with zero experience cannot mismanage the operation any worse than the Grahams did.

One by one, newspapers are disappearing. Young adults do not read them. There is no future to them. Funeral by funeral, their doom is sealed.

Liberals thought they would shape public opinion by controlling the flow of information and opinion. They were wrong. The World Wide Web is killing them. Craigslist has killed revenue from classified ads. The Drudge Report has killed local newspaper loyalty.

Does the liberal press have a future? Not as good as the Drudge Report, surely, or Craigslist.