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 Poker
Source Online has the most volatile traffic data of the site's profiled here. Its Hitwise and Quantcast numbers reflect
that the site's traffic is made up to a very high degree return traffic, but Quantcast ranks it well out of the top 25,
while Hitwise attributes a quarter of its traffic to search terms -- well below the most popular sites, but significantly
more than those sites without much search presence.
Compete.com is a bit in between. Poker Source Online is the one clear anomaly between Compete.com and Quantcast, with
Compete.com recognizing double the number of monthly unique visitors that Quantcast does. Since Hitwise seems to back up
both, it seems likely the truth is somewhere between the Compete.com and Quantcast numbers, with Compete.com possibly
being a bit closer to "right".
In any case, everybody looking for anything and everything close to "free poker chips" or "free poker money"
will have seen a top result from Pokersourceonline.com. No doubt about it, it commands its niche.
Which is only appropriate since it basically built the niche from scratch. While inventing "get a free chip set for
signing up at an online poker site" may not be the same as inventing the telephone, there is no doubt that Poker Source
Online saw a niche and plunged headlong into it, even making mistakes along the way like making promises clearly not
allowed by some of the cardrooms. Given the skunks these days whose entire business is set up trying to rip off cardrooms
by telling players to uninstall software and sign up again for one reason or another, its almost quaint to look back at
the lesser original sins of a couple years ago.
In spring 2007 Pokersourceonline.com bought Pocketfives.com, making it the third entity to have two sites among the top 25
(along with Playwinningpoker.com/Poker-babes.com, and Pokerlistings.com/Learn-texas-holdem.com). As mentioned in the in the
Pocket Fives article, this acquisition is sort of a merger of both strengths and weaknesses. The traffic of both of these
domains is largely from very loyal visitors, while both under-perform in terms of search traffic. Basically they just made
their same core business bigger than what they had before. Time will tell if they address the common weakness to really give
this new network a boost. |
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