Valleywag reports that while the “Drudge Report may be the most successful independent news site on the web… (more than 1.2m unique visitors from the US in February, according to Comscore)… devotees may not check the site quite as often as Matt Drudge would claim.”

How’d Drudge do it? VW: “A site’s ‘meta refresh‘ setting is a web page’s meta tag used to specify a time-interval after which a web browser will automatically refresh the page. Most sites leave it to readers to call for the latest version of a page; but popular news sites often assume that visitors will leave their pages open, and ensure the page is reloaded so that the latest headlines show. Nothing wrong with that — except that the Drudge Report is automatically refreshed way more often than the frequency of new stories would justify. At 20 times an hour, Drudge is twice as aggressive in his use of this tactic as the next news site we checked.”

Hmmm. Readers are taking note. It is a popular site, but, as loucabron notes: “These numbers smell.”

Tags: blogosphere, drudge, leslie post, traffic tricks