The Drudge Report is Not a News Site?

At least that's what you have to believe if you listen to Nielsen Online.

They have a posting up on the wire about the increased traffic to news sites during the election season, but Drudge, who certainly gets more traffic than some of the listed sites there, didn't make the top 30.

You can argue either that Drudge produces little original content or that ideology might play into his editorial decisions, but when Google and Yahoo! News, as well as HuffPo made the list, both of those arguments go out the window.

WTF?

Really Cool Media Blog

Nielsen Wire is something I kind of stumbled across this morning when I saw some within-state comparisons of ad spending by the presidential candidates. But I browsed around and found a lot of other cool stuff.

Wonder if some of this was pulled from db4500...

Google Making a Run at Nielsen?

Of course their ultimate goal is to take over the world, but Google started running a new "feature" last week that Toolbar users are having all their online behavior tracked if they are logged in. Users can opt out should they desire.

One has to wonder if Google is making a play at offering a Nielsen-like audience measurement service. After all this groundwork is set up, it would probably be a cakewalk to throw something like that together and they get around the significant panel recruitment costs that Nielsen and others incur.

It's also not hard to argue that with the size of their userbase, Google's data might be more representative of Internet users as a whole.