The Drudge Report may be the most successful independent news site on the web. Matt Drudge's decade-old site sets the news agenda, and not only for conservative platforms such as Fox News. The fedora-wearing eccentric's property, considering it's largely put together by just two people, has an impressive audience: more than 1.2m unique visitors from the US in February, according to Comscore. But those devotees may not check the site quite as often as Matt Drudge would claim.

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.

What's the effect on the site's traffic? Each refresh counts as a new pageview, whether or not the user is watching, or the window remains visible. And there must be plenty of these inattentive readers: one site owner I know experienced a 20% jump in traffic after he introduced, as an experiment, an automatic refresh every half hour. Drudge loads anew every three minutes.

So, when Matt Drudge trumpets his gigantic traffic — he recently passed the 20m pageview a day mark — take that claim much like one should parse one of his headlines. There's some truth to it — Drudge is indubitably popular — hyped up to the point of misdirection.

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