While the Fox News Web site continues to show hardly any sign of the company's cozy new relationship with Matt Drudge, the same cannot be said of the "citizen journalist's" eponymous Report. Indeed, now that Drudge has his hands deep inside Rupert Murdoch's gamy, lucre-filled pockets, the self-styled media outsider's perspective on the vast Fox empire, which used to be marked by a healthy measure of hard-boiled skepticism, now resembles that of a well-trained PR presstitute. While Drudge failed to respond to our queries regarding exactly how much Murdoch is paying him, we can't help but think that the savvy media baron is getting his money's worth. Indeed, with the Drudge Report reportedly receiving 11,000,000 visits a month, a single mention in a Drudge column is worth at least US$16,470*. In other words, even if nobody at all is tuning in to watch his twitchy TV theatrics, Drudge's increasingly frequent - and now uniformly positive - plugs for Fox in the Drudge Report make him a sound investment.

*How did we arrive at this figure? 11,000,000 visits a month equals approximately 366,000 page views a day, assuming a 30-day month. Banner advertising on well-trafficked editorial sites generally earns anywhere from $30 to $60 per thousand page views (aka CPM: cost per thousand). 366,000 at a $30 CPM would net him $10,980; at a $60 CPM, he'd see $21,960. Split the difference, and voilà, you have $16,470.