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 Play
Winning Poker went online in 2000. Its
Winners Guide to Online Poker was the first online poker
strategy guide on the Internet, and was the only one for quite sometime. Now there are hundreds. Along with Poker Pages and Two Plus Two,
it created the model for a paid in advance advertising supported poker strategy site... a model few followed. I believe the paid advertising
model serves the purposes of all involved better than the affiliate model, where longterm relationships are significantly more difficult
to maintain since the parties are in adversarial relationships more often.
Being an established domain helps in terms of search rankings, no doubt about it, but an interesting aspect of the
advertising-versus-affiliate model is a site with an ad model can earn value for an advertiser via branding, trust
association, and most importantly, because a domain like Play Winning Poker (Poker Pages and Two Plus Two for that
matter also) encourages players to play MORE often and more competently. At the same time, this allows the information
site to not play favorites. The more interested visitors become in poker, the better it is for all the advertisers,
even if a visitor does not that day go straight to the advertiser. The creation of stronger, smarter poker players is
better for all the advertisers, even if initially that player goes to a competitor. Someday that more empowered visitor
will be around to sample them too. So, an ad supported site can target terms not nearly as "sexy" or immediate
gratification focused. I don't care if a player goes to cardroom A over cardroom B. I only care that their love for
poker and desire to play has grown, and they are now more motivated to follow through on that desire.
Play Winning Poker has been an internationally focused domain since its inception, but became more so in 2002 with the
introduction of the first of fifteen different language sections. (I wish I had a nickel for every email I've gotten in
Russian or Norwegian thinking I speak that language!) While this is wonderful, it also offers more opportunities for
frustration -- imagine losing your #1 rankings in German for "poker" and "online poker" overnight
due to a bizarrely applied Google 950 penalty, and then having to start from close to scratch to try and regain some
of your previous ranking.
Play Winning Poker is not a forum or news site, so there are only a
finite number of words to read (even if that number is in the hundreds of thousands), so unless somebody is a really, really slow
reader, it's not the type of site that gets visited by the same person every day. This explains its lower (circa May 2007) Hitwise
ranking (#8), which measures repeat visitors, versus its higher Compete.com (#3) and Quantcast.com (#1) traffic numbers. (See the
Top 25 for more.) It's a good illustration that there are several
ways to build a successful poker information site. While other fine sites are set up to offer content about the events of the
day (whether news or forum posts), Play Winning Poker is set up to have two distinctly different missions: introduce novices
to the world of poker, and to give dedicated players strategic content to hopefully help their game for years to come. |
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