Don’t believe Drudge has that much reach, or that Free Republic has that little. When Drudge was at his peak, I ran an ad on it, in font like his, so it would look like an article, with a text that any conservative would click on. I was told the ad was to be served one million times, and I figured most conservatives who saw it would click on it. The ad only got 137 click throughs from the million serves, and I would not be surprised some of those were bots crawling the web. I think they lie about Drudge’s numbers, and they do that for a lot of sites they control.
I have my own site now, and I see traffic stuff from the inside, and much of the numbers you are told are bull. I have gotten a link from National Review which sent me about 200 clicks, despite it supposedly having 10 million pageviews per month, and I have gotten a link from author/publisher/media-guy Vox Day’s blog, and had ten thousand page views, despite him only having like a few million pageviews per month back then.
I have noticed many sites, like NR, or Daily Caller, etc seem to have a lot of press, and we are told they have millions of viewers, but I will bet they have nothing like that, and FR has a lot more, because those sites are hit or miss content-wise, but FR always has stuff that brings people back.
Plus, now that I have been in politics through the site and publishing, all I am going to say is much of what you have been told - about other people’s beliefs, about how government works, and about your own life and freedom, is gaslighting, designed to control you and make you accept things you would never accept otherwise.
Really, I still periodically just shake my head. Nothing works like you are told.