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 Sharkscope.com
is the only "after-boom" site on the Top 25 list, meaning the site achieved most of its popularity after Fall 2006.
Prior to April 2006, it was nothing but a small traffic blip on the screen. Since then however, "you can't keep a good
idea down", or at least not a good idea that is handled well.
Sharkscope basically tracks online poker sit and go tournament play. Now unless you are an online sit and go player,
that sounds about as exciting as warm milk, but if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of online sit and go
players, Sharkscope offers you quite a valuable tool.
Aside from Sharkscope, other tool and database sites offering software or lists of statistics also do well traffic-wise.
Pokertracker.com, Officialpokerrankings.com and others would rank in the top 50 poker information sites, and Bluff Magazine's
purchase of Thepokerdb.com which now redirects to its site, is significantly responsible for its large traffic growth in 2007.
So, besides news, forums and strategy, you now can add "tools" as an item that can make a successful poker information
website.
The jury is still out on how successful though. A problem with a site like Sharkscope is, to state the obvious, the
only people interested in its information are people who already play poker online. The first thing a person who has
never played online will say will not be "hey, I want to see some sit and go stats!" So, in terms of a business
model, the return from being an affiliate is probably well below the industry average per unique visitor to the site.
Hey Sharkscope... look into taking only paid advertising. As a site with mostly committed returning visitors, the
online cardrooms would do well to have their brand all over this site -- even if it won't generate many new players,
it encourages existing players to play more and better, which is an even more valuable thing to accomplish.
As the top 25 lists show, Sharkscope.com shows better on
Hitwise stats than Compete.com or Quantcast. This is because Hitwise counts return visitors (up to over 40 times a day),
while the other two only count a unique visitor once a month. The Sharkscope Quantcast page is extremely telling,
as it shows 94% of Sharkscope's visitors are either "regulars" or "addicts" -- addicts account for
2% of the site's visitors but a whopping 19% of total visits.
In terms of search engine optimization, let's just say Sharkscope ain't in the top 25 for that. At the time of this
writing, Sharkscope does rank #1 for variations on its name and some "online sit n go statistics" type searches,
but the site design and robots.txt disallow prevents it from being found for anything not on its hopelessly bloated front
page (308k!). Sites that have great word of mouth traffic still should not ignore search engines. |
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