Huffington Post Tops Drudge in Unique Visitors in February [Updated]
Arianna Huffington beats Matt Drudge—by at least one metric.
In February, the Huffington Post had 3.7 million unique visitors to the Drudge Report's 3.4 million, according to stats from Nielsen Online. In January, Drudge had 3.2 million visitors and the Huffington Post 2.9 million. (Last month in Off the Record we documented the narrowing gap between the two sites).
But then again, finding accurate numbers is tricky. Insiders at the Huffington Post tells Kara Swisher that it had 12 million uniqes last month (CEO Ken Lerer told us that it was about eight million). But whether the Huffington Post disagrees with the numbers, it likes the message enough: Its spokesman sent out a mass e-mail to media reporters advertising the story this morning.
UPDATE: A Huffington Post spokesman sent us a statement to clarify why there were different unique visitor stats in Kara Swisher's piece from the one we did a month ago. Here's the statement: "When the Observer published its story on February 20th, HuffPost had roughly 8 million unique visitors in the previous 30-day period. As All Things Digital reported, using the same methodology -- our internal numbers provided by Google Analytics -- HuffPost had 12 million unique visitors in February."
The Huffington Post is a grave disappointment for those who are really interested in reading about important political and social issues. They have greatly mischaracterized Sen. Hillary Clinton and allow the pro-gun types to flame and libel gun control advocacy organizations and those tied to them. I think that Adrianna Huffington may just be so commercialized that she comes off as being extremely self-righteous and domineering. Her site is like a cancer. It ceases to be helpful to readers & turns in on itself, causing damage and injury.