What's a little traffic inflation amongst friends? When you are in the news and advertising business it's a big deal. In fact, as Conrad M. Black and the Chicago Sun-Times can tell you it can also be a very expensive deal as well.

I ran across an item over at ValleyWag.com that discussed the traffic statistics of The Drudge Report and compared them to other popular news outlets such as The Washington Post and Reuters.

It appears that Matt Drudge is artificially inflating his traffic statistics by using a small bit of HTML, specifically this piece of HTML: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="175". If you don't happen to be a web geek like me you may not know that causes the site to refresh itself completely every 175 seconds (2 minutes and 55 seconds). As the Valley Wag article notes this is sometimes done by large news organizations to make sure readers are getting the freshest headlines.

Aside from this refresh rate being far more aggressive than any other news organization out there it is also highly deceptive both in terms of claiming influence and in terms of advertising revenue. Matt Drudge employs a CPM model for his advertisements (view his rate sheet), and his web site is widely perceived to be influential because of his reported traffic numbers. Additionally, new ads are served with each page refresh.

What that means is that his advertisers are being cheated. Like many large sites readers often leave a browser window open for long portions of the day and check in periodically to see what is new. The Drudge Report is being refreshed 20 times per hour so that means that Matt Drudge's advertisers are paying for impressions that no one sees and the CPM is being inflated by these unnecessary page refreshes causing the ad impressions to be more expensive. If I were an advertiser I'd have to say I'd be pretty steamed about that.

I don't know Matt Drudge so I can't say for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to pad his advertising numbers, but even the most unsophisticated analysis would show that the smaller that number is, the more page views climb. So whether intentional or not, it is highly deceptive.

While Drudge is by far the worst actor there are other news organizations that would be showing inflated numbers based on these techniques as well. The Washington Post uses a bit of javascript to accomplish the same effect. Reuters uses both javascript and provides a noscript tag that employs the meta refresh method in case javascript is not available for a browser. The refresh rates for these organizations are set to roughly 6 minutes per refresh.

This is a problem that advertisers should take time to educate themselves on. It is reasonable for a news organization or a blog to want to maintain fresh headlines, but they shouldn't take the easy way out. Using any sort of meta refresh method is not acceptable, these sites should be using small bits of AJAX to update specific elements of their pages instead of rendering the entire page again. Not only does that approach ensure accurate and honest numbers can be presented to advertisers, it saves the site owner money by reducing their bandwidth bill.