Something Strange at MakePokerLegal.com

I stopped by to check out a story on the website MakePokerLegal.com which is run by Mike Matusow’s brother Scott. I was sort of astonished to see this stat up in the corner of the page:

31,954 unique visitors in a single day is a pretty impressive stat. Actually, it’s strangely impressive. If the site was averaging just 2 page views per visitor that would mean that the MPL was clocking close to 2 million page views per month. That’s pretty serious traffic from a site that most people have never heard of before. Even if it is the sounding board for Mike Matusow it seems rather odd that it’s doing that much traffic and gets so little exposure.

If true, this was quite an interesting bit of information. But the more I tried to dig into the question the less confident I became about the number being advertised. For instance, on Alexa this humble little website, Bill’s Poker Blog, consistently outranks MPL.

I’m the red line in the graph and MPL is the blue line. But if I’m not doing anywhere near 32,000 unique users per day how can MPL have more visitors while being ranked as having a smaller reach than my site? To put it in perspective, I would be happy if that was my monthly figure. To have 32,000 unique visitors a month would be pretty impressive. To be doing it per day is . . . well, absolutely tearing the cover off the ball.

I checked PR (page rank), inbound links, and just about every other metric I could use to measure popularity and MPL didn’t even come close. I mean in some cases the differences were just silly. In some cases my stats were 30:1 over MPL.

I had to run to Thai class in the middle of writing this blog post and when I left at around noon (GMT +7) the number on the MPL site was 31,978 and when I came home and checked approx 5 hours later the number was 32,057. That’s 79 unique users in 5 hours. If you divide 79 by 5 (hours) to get an hourly average and then multiply that back by 24 you get a pace of 379.2 unique users per day.

Okay, I decided that before posting anything I would give it a full 24 hour cycle. Here it is 24 hours (and some change) from when I first noticed and the number is at: 32,182. As you can see the difference is 228 visitors which is far more in-line with the hourly rate prediction. I also did various samples several times and the hourly rate of visitors always remained in a range that would put the site on track for 200 – 300 unique visitors per day. I never, at any time, saw it accelerate to a point that would indicate that they could be on pace to hit 32,000 uniques per day. Nor did I see at any time during the 24 hours I monitored the site a lower reading than the previous one. The counter was always counting up.

The only thing I can possibly conclude is that the numbers are not daily numbers at all. They have to be total visitors since a certain date in the past. My guess it is the start date of the site or whenever they installed this counter program. The first blog post on the site seems to have been Nov 7, 2009. That’s about 16 months. Back then they were averaging about 3 or 4 posts a month and I don’t see any signs that Mike Matusow had attached his name to the site at that time so really low traffic in the beginning makes sense. Scott Matusow didn’t make a post on the blog until Jan 2010. The first time Mike even warranted a tag was in June 2010 during the WSOP.

I guess the moral of the story is that if something seems strange to you, it probably is. I don’t know why I invested this much time into this other than the fact that I was simply so amazed at the numbers MPL was supposedly doing. I went there to read about the story about PokerStars disqualifying one of the winners in the Sunday $5 million guarantee and I saw that number and was like, “Whoa!” I wanted to get some ideas about what was the magic juice fueling so much traffic on a site devoted to a somewhat niche topic. The numbers sounded too good to be true and it turns out that they most likely are too good to be true.