Not likely, but that doesn't stop
Kara Swisher from offering up some anecdotal evidence suggesting a comparatively larger growth trend for the liberal website:
According to data from Nielsen Online, for example, the Huffington
Post’s traffic–as measured by monthly unique visitors in the U.S., at
home and work–has more than tripled since February of 2007, when it had
about 1.1 million unique visitors; by February of 2008, unique visitors
had risen to 3.7 million.
In that same month, the Drudge Report had 3.4 million (it had 2.75 million in February of 2007).
Data from comScore is different, as measurement data often is, but
shows the same trend (see chart below). The Huffington Post jumped from
457,000 unique visitors in the U.S. at all locations, but had risen to
2.3 million in February of 2008.
For Drudge, comScore reported that it had 1.2 million unique visitors in February of 2007 and 1.6 million in February of 2008.
The problem here, as Swisher herself notes, is that traffic measurement sites are imperfect. These two examples provide some evidence that Huffington may be bringing in new readers at a faster pace than Drudge, but that's like MSNBC claiming its the top news network because it has the most new viewers, when in reality, it's still the third-place network in a three man race. It also ignores Drudge's main selling point: repeat visitors. Because Drudge is a news aggregator, as opposed to a unique content generator like Huffington, his readers come for a snapshot of the day's biggest stories -- several times a day.
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