We all know the heft of The Drudge Report, but I learned first-hand yesterday just how hefty it can be. It's also an instruction in the link economy's possibilities.
One of the stories from our Canwest News Service concerned criticism of Susan Palin by actress Annette Bening. One of our Web editors placed the story --- innocently, I might add --- and headlined it Obama-backer Bening Pillories Palin.
Well, away we went. Somehow Drudge found the story from us, posted it, and we now are around 350,000 page views in the first 24 hours on that single piece. It appears search engine alert traffic is only now kicking in.
Now, there are still questions on how to monetize all of this, but it's clearly a windfall opportunity. The last time Drudge linked to us was from another seemingly innocuous item from one of the founders of Greenpeace's criticisms of Leonardo diCaprio's environmental movie --- a story buried in our paper a bit. Goes to show how some things are surprisingly popular and how there is no such thing as local online media in a search-engine world.
