In a pretty glowing profile of the conservative “news” site Newsmax (click here and here for some idea of what Newsmax considers news), Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman just lets this slide by:
I asked Ruddy if he ever felt a pang of restlessness, not to mention outright jealousy, that other Republican editors and pundits are household names — and he is anything but.
“I have purposefully avoided doing a lot of media,” he said evenly. “Knowing a person’s name doesn’t translate into business success. People think I should be the star of Newsmax but I saw what happened with Salon. (Founder) Dave Talbot was on ‘Charlie Rose,’ out in front. Now it’s not even a player anymore.”
Now, both Friedman and a recent profile in Forbes accepted at face value Newsmax’s claim that they’re bigger than Drudge. Highly unlikely (and its not like I like Drudge’s conservative politics). But the comparison with Salon is an interesting one. One I decided to check.
From Alexa:
From Compete.com:
From Quantcast:
In the most generous interpretation of the numbers I’d say the two sites are practically neck-and-neck and even if you gave a slight edge to Newsmax, it’s a slight one.
Newsmax was very quick to make their news feeds free for webmasters early on, this gave them a big advantage on the Lowest Common Denominator of sites. Meaning anyone looking to set up a one page news site and slap ads on it were able to with newsmax and since the webmasters didn’t care what news was displaying, just that it kept refreshing with news, they allowed the feeds to stay. Many are still there, silently turning out revenue for webmasters. Basically giving newsmax more links but less valuable links.
Is anyone else seeing Giant Blue Borders around some of the pictures?
Oh, c’mon it’s Newsmax…a name we can trust (not).