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Matt Drudge Has Barely Changed Anything About The Drudge Report In The Last 20 Years. This Summer, He Upended Its Advertising Business.
Craig Silverman
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 15, 2019, at 5:23 p.m. ET
In a surprising turn, Drudge Report removed ads between the end of May and mid-July, according to Danny Rogers, a cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, a project that’s analyzing domains to generate “risk ratings of the world’s media sites.” After noticing an absence of ads on Drudge around May 31, “we didn’t see any ads on Drudge until about July 12,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News.
During that period, Drudge cast off his advertising representative of close to 20 years, Intermarkets, in favor of a new and unknown company, Granite Cubed. It has no record in the digital ad industry, was only registered as a company in March of this year, and lists no staff or owners on its websites. Yet it just landed one of the biggest websites in the US.
Corporate records show that Granite Cubed is owned by Margaret Otto. She and her husband, Adrian, have a business association with the Drudge family that goes back years. The couple acquired Refdesk, a reference website founded by Bob Drudge, Matt’s father, in 2017. They also operated a company that began hosting the Drudge Report in 1999 and later added Breitbart as a customer. (The couple did not answer questions about whether they still own that hosting company or if it’s still hosting Drudge or Breitbart.)
Adrian Otto is the technical director of Google Cloud. He told BuzzFeed News he is not involved with Granite Cubed. Upon joining Google in 2017 from Rackspace, he said, he “stopped operating [his] other business interests” and is no longer involved with “hosting duties” for other websites. Otto was previously listed as the technical contact in the domain registration of breitbart.com, and was thanked by name in the foreword to Andrew Breitbart’s book about Hollywood.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/drudge-report-ad-revenue