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 Poker
has been the #1 most searched word, and also one of the most profitable online business areas, with more than one company
worth in excess of a billion dollars. So if you owned Poker.com, you'd have a billion dollar business, right?
Wrong, and wrong at least three times.
The various owners of the Poker.com domain have managed to do next to nothing with it. Two different cardrooms and two
different portals have performed no better than moderately operating on this most prized of URLs.
No doubt the domain gets lots of type-in traffic, and has ranked in the top five for a poker search basically
forever, sometimes at #1. Despite this, it has little other search traffic.
Poker.com is the ultimate one trick pony.
As shown by the Compete.com graphic here (click it to see the current one), after becoming a portal in early 2007,
traffic took a major nosedive. The cardroom that had been on the domain was spun off as a separate entity and a portal
established on Poker.com as the owners attempted to sell the domain name for something greater than $25 million. Domain
names in general are worthless, operating websites are what have value -- but here is the biggest exception there is.
Somebody who knows something about something could make a lot of money over the next decade with Poker.com, but somebody
who will continue to ignore search marketing and use the domain not well will continue operating an eight-figure business
that should be a ten figure one. |
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