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 Except
for Cardplayer.com, Two Plus Two is the oldest of the Top 25 poker information sites. Established in 1997, Two Plus Two
is primarily a poker forum, or more accurately a group of many gambling forums, but the site's initial purpose was to
sell books by David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth and Ray Zee, who participate in the ownership.
In terms of search traffic, Two Plus Two has innumerable problems stacked against it, but a lot of those problems can be tracked
back to the initial purpose of the site. Back in 1997, anyone looking for their books would have no problem using a search engine
to find the site. Now however, that isn't even true, let alone the idea of finding the site for other poker content.
Forums of course are wildly hit and miss in terms of valuable information -- some is right on, other information is
hopelessly wrong or even posted for a dishonest reason (like someone with a grudge against a cardroom posting some
negative comments about the cardroom).
Post poker-boom Twoplustwo.com even made a choice to sell forum space to other sites (like Pokersourceonline.com) who
would then direct traffic to their income streams. Despite this not-very-financially-savvy move, Two Plus Two generates
revenue just fine, both via book sales and via paid in advance advertising. Pre-poker boom, it was one of the sites
(along with Poker Pages and Play Winning Poker) that set up the basic troika of how poker information sites can make
money: forum, news, strategy articles... lots of different ways to get visitors to a poker domain.
At the same time, similar to Cardplayer.com, Twoplustwo.com rather aggressively paid no attention to search marketing
for the site, and still does not. Despite this it remains the largest poker forum on the Internet.
One note about its rankings on the top 25 site list, more
attention should be paid to its Quantcast.com and Compete.com rankings than its Hitwise position. Hitwise rather
bizarrely tracks forumserver.twoplustwo.com separately from the main domain. This leads to forumserver.twoplustwo.com
being the largest source of traffic for Twoplustwo.com and for Twoplustwo.com being the largest source of traffic for
forumserver.twoplustwo.com! Of course this is duplicate nonsense, since the site links the forumserver URLs
interchangeably with the root URL. In other words, there is no way to get a fully accurate appreciation of the site's
real visitors from Hitwise -- you can't add the two numbers together, but you also can't just ignore that some visitors
first come to the site via the subdomain.
Quantcast gives a better appreciation of the situation, noting that 90% of those who visit Twoplustwo.com also visit
forumserver.twoplustwo.com, while 100% who visit forumserver.twoplustwo.com visit Twoplustwo.com. The bottom line is since Hitwise
tracks "visits" and not "unique visitors", the number for Twoplustwo.com is lower than it should be. |
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