This month, PokerOrg became the most visited poker media website in the world…for a day. Sure, it was an anomaly resulting from the enormous interest in our story on the controversy over a player believed to be using real-time assistance at a live WSOP table. Regardless, we had the most visitors in our history, and for the first time, our website surpassed long-time industry giant PokerNews in web visitors for a single day. While a fleeting statistic, it is symbolic of the now-undeniable trend: we are the fastest-growing poker media company in the world.
PokerOrg is now consistently the second-most visited poker media site, despite competing with news outlets that have a 20-year headstart. Those legacy sites have spent two decades building audiences and SEO rankings with the help of deep-pocketed billion-dollar parent companies and/or decades of poker profits.
It was just two years ago that PokerOrg took its first tentative steps on a new journey under new ownership and mission. At that time, we laid out a long-term vision to disrupt poker media, which we felt had become too corporate, too boring, and too slow. Our editorial goal was to put players’ interests and voices at the center of our storytelling and to modernize how we create poker news content to better meet the changes in the way media is consumed.
I predicted that “poker’s best days are coming,” and I’m very happy to say that the past 24 months have brought some of the most exciting, rewarding, and record-breaking poker that the world has ever seen.
The new poker boom
There’s been an eye-popping surge in attendance at live poker events; new poker content online and on TV, including the resurrection of classic poker TV shows and new popular series; confidence among players who believe we are in the midst of a new poker boom; and the rise of online poker competition that has seen the leadership for online poker dominance change for the first time in almost two decades.
We spent our first year getting our bearings, hiring our core editorial staff, and experimenting with content styles. In our second year, we became the official media partner of the WSOP Circuit, and we were thrust into covering 2-3 tournaments every month from somewhere in America. That meant recruiting lots of new talent to become a finely-tuned live reporting machine, while still refining our style and introducing the poker world to a new form of tournament coverage that is social-first, highly visual, buzzy, vibrant, and told from the players’ point of view.
I also (somewhat audaciously) said that PokerOrg will be a leading global poker media company.
It was a gamble…it still is. But now it’s paying off in traffic and putting us in the league we were aiming for. Most importantly, though, we think it’s paying off with content that players are loving and that our competitors are flattering us by imitating.
For the coming year, PokerOrg will bring more ways for players to engage with our reporters, editors, and creators; more ways for players to pursue their love of the game; and more ways to engage with each other through our community, which we call The Org. So our mission and vision have evolved, and we’ve expanded our ambition to include our goal of making every poker player want to become a member of The Org.
Poker’s best days continue to be ahead of us, and PokerOrg looks forward to telling that global story in the most vibrant way possible.
