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."