Poker.org Goes For $1million. Worth it?
So, the sale of poker.org for $1million broke the record for a .org domain. That’s all well and good for the .org domain family, but is the domain actually worth $1million?
It depends on what they do with it. Obviously if they sell poker chips then it won’t be, but lets assume that they’re either going to build a poker site or create a big-ass affiliate site.
It’s quite obvious that they’ve bought the domain with SEO in mind.
Poker.org is an *exact-match domain*. An exact-match domain exists when the core word or phrase that makes up the domain-name is often used by consumers looking for that service in the search engines. Mobiles.co.uk, biscuit-recipies.co.uk and liveroulette.org are all, therefore, exact-match domains too.
The value of having an exact-match domain is that it is easier to rank highly in the search engines for that core keyword. Hotels.com generally have an easier ride when trying to rank for hotels than Hilton, for example. Check out the SERPs for yourself.
So in my opinion, the reason why poker.org has gone for $1million is that they believe it’ll be easier to rank for poker in Google.
Now we all know it would be great to rank highly for poker. It is the most searched for keyword in the poker industry, after all. But is it worth $1 million? Let’s look at the evidence.
How big is poker?
As you can see above, poker as a single keyword is searched for approximately 2.75 million times per month worldwide in Google. Let’s estimate that the other search engines will contribute another 10% of searches on top of that and we’re looking at slightly over 3 million searches per month.
The Calculation
For the basis of this calculation (is poker.org worth $1m?), I’m going to be weighing up spending £1 million (or £660k) on a domain and ranking in natural search, versus the equivilent cost in attaining the same traffic through PPC. PPC and SEO are very similar in terms of player’s acquired, so I’ll use this to weigh up the value of the domain, rather than a different marketing technique, such as spending £10k on a domain then the rest on great affiliate marketing, for example.
I’m also going to assume that you’ll need to spend £10k per month on links and localised content, to get ranking for poker in the most searched-for languages. Just buying poker.org is not enough to have it ranking in such a competitive landscape.
For this calculation, we’ll assume that page one of Google has a 2% click through rate from the SERPs. Obviously if you are ranked in position one, your CTR will be significantly higher, but let’s be conservative here. I also think it’ll take at least 6 months for a good SEO to get a page one ranking for this domain, so I’m going to say that we’ll recieve ZERO traffic for 6 months, to give me an easier calculation. So we’ll work it out like this:
£660k for domain + £240k for SEO/Content for two years will be our costs.
Zero traffic for 6 months, then 60,000 clicks per month (from page one, 3 million searches at 2% CTR), so over 24 months you’d recieve 1.08m clicks. This is the return on our costs.
Therefore, the overall cost per click through SEO is £0.83.
Now, I know that currently the term poker costs about £14+ per click if you are doing your PPC through Google. I know you can’t do PPC around the world for poker, but let’s assume you can in this instance – it doesn’t really make much of a difference.
So to get the same exposure for the website (1.08m clicks) through PPC, you’d need to spend over £15m on clicks! Yes, PPC is that much more expensive!
And to be honest, the value from choosing good domain+SEO over PPC is even greater than I’ve shown here. Why? Well after the 2 year calculation above, you’ll still only be spending your £10k per month on links and content, whereas your PPC costs will remain astronomical. SEO ROI will get better over time – PPC will not (or not so much). Additionally, I was only assuming that poker.org would rank for one keyword, poker. Playing your cards right, with many pages of content and a balanced link-building strategy will see your domain rank for many long-tail phrases too, so this is an added bonus.
So it’s quite clear that, if properly managed, splashing out $1m on the keyword-rich domain, poker.org, is a bold but clever strategy for the new owners. Good luck to them!
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