Online Poker Traffic Thrives With 2009 WSOP
I am truly excited by the amount of Web traffic coming in for Gambling911.com's poker coverage, and it's not just the World Series of Poker that is helping to fuel things. Gambling911 has enjoyed tremendous readership from the online poker community in recent weeks thanks to our reports on the highly publicized funds seizures involving Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars processors.
As most of our readers know, Gambling911.com believes that a stifling of the media is best suited for places like Iran and not the U.S., hence the reason why our parent company, Costigan Media, has filed a Motion to Intervene and have all court documents, including seizure warrants, unsealed in order that we can report more accurately on this matter. It's our First Amendment right. Any decision in the New York Circuit Court will be precedent setting.
This past weekend's traffic was generated by three events: The World Series of Poker, UFC 100 and the upcoming British Open Golf Tournament, also called the Open Championship.
We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of traffic that came in as a result of UFC 100, more than double the number of most previous UFC events, though still way off from marquee boxing matches like Pacquiao vs Hatton.
This past weekend overall was very good for us considering all the warm sunshine that permeated much of the U.S. Traffic was so much better than a typical 2nd weekend in July, thanks mostly to these key events.
Our poker traffic keeps growing by leaps and bounds. The Gambling911.com Poker News is now the most visited section of the website, and now ranks right up there along side the top articles of the day in terms of number of visitors.
Outside of the general World Series of Poker coverage, our most popular searches over the past two months have related to:
Eric Cloutier
Phil Ivey
Annie Duke
Phil Hellmuth
Daniel Negreanu
Tom "Durrr" Dwan
Russ Hamilton
Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars were the most searched for online poker rooms entering the Gambling911.com website. Full Tilt in fact received more search inquiries during the month of June than any other term outside of the Belmont Stakes, Tiger Woods Wife, Adam Lambert, US Open Odds, Gambling911 and Online Poker. Repeat visitor rate was 12.58 percent as many customers wished to stay abreast of the latest news surrounding the online poker funds seizures. Full Tilt Poker even managed to beat out Gay Footballers. PokerStars eCheck and eCheck were two other popular search terms from last month related to poker. Variations on those terms (i.e. PokerStars eCheck Problems) helped boost traffic numbers further.
The Doyle Brunson blog postings continue to be among the most popular reads even though there are fewer people specifically searching for "Doyle Brunson".
2009 British Open betting traffic was heavy on Monday. Two of the three most read articles on the site early Monday dealt with the Open Championship. Sportsbook.com, Sportingbet and BetUS.com were likely getting the brunt of this traffic, having been featured among these articles as a result of their offering British Open odds throughout the weekend. BetUS.com should be capitalizing the most since they are featured in two of the three most popular articles on the site Monday.
Gambling911.com is ranked #4 in Google Search for 2009 World Series of Poker Updates. As of 3 pm EST, we also ranked high for Phil Ivey searches on the Google News feed that also appears on Google's home page. We were ranking on the first page of Bing.com for the search term "World Series of Poker".
Search inquiries for the 2009 British Open, Phil Ivey and the World Series of Poker continued to be among the most active entering the Gambling911.com website as of Monday afternoon.
Be sure to check out our new MARKETING SECTION of Gambling911.com, geared towards serious industry marketers, operators and affiliates, not to mention other website owners.
Payton O'Brien, Gambling911.com Senior Editor
