Nat Arem's Blog

I normally don’t go 13 days without a blog, but I guess it happens to everyone sometimes. Everyday I either didn’t have anything to blog about or I was just really busy and I didn’t have time to type anything out. Anyway…

Two milestones/anniversaries just passed.

First, thepokerdb. We launched it on the BLUFF site on March 25, 2007, so it’s been on that domain for slightly over a year. Looking back, I am pretty happy with how things turned out. The site is running pretty smoothly, we have a lot of good features that we never had on the old site (instant updates, hand history paster, more data breakdowns, good watchlists, etc). I know that lot of people bitched and moaned when we moved the site over and they were used to the old look, but I’m sure almost everyone would agree at this point that the BLUFF site is a massive improvement over what we had before.

I think that BLUFF is going to do a pretty good job with the db going forward. After we got the db launched in March of last year, the BLUFF development team basically focused 100% on the World Series of Poker website for the next 6 months or so. They didn’t really do anything, I was living in Las Vegas, etc, etc. That set the db back a little because it just wasn’t getting the attention that it needed to really grow and thrive. However, now that the WSOP site is up and running and the development team has a little more time on their hands, thepokerdb is a getting a lot more effort. We’ve made some serious strides in areas like SEO and website speed. There’s still a lot to do, but I’m confident that it will get done.

The second milestone actually dates back about 5 years. If you google my name, the second page has a result on it that is actually a paper of mine from a marketing class that I took in college. The professor liked the paper and asked me awhile ago if he could use it as an example. The paper itself is the usual drivel that everyone in college tends to produce. Of course you write it while thinking about how to get a keg through a narrow basement doorway or something like that. But, somehow, someway, the paper is surprisingly accurate! I actually managed to predict (ie, make up) Dell’s sales five years out. My prediction is only like 1% off or so compared to Dell’s actual reported sales figures. I haven’t bothered to add up all of the sales breakdown figures from the 10-Qs and last I checked the 10-K wasn’t out, but the latest reported revenue amount is 61.133 billion, pretty damn close to my $60 billion prediction/guess. I really don’t think anyone needs to actually read the paper because it was just to show that I understood some concepts that we’d gone over, but it’s pretty cool that it’s close! Maybe I should give all the nonsense in my old management and marketing classes a little more credit.

http://douchebagbeach.blip.tv had me laughing out loud multiple times an episode. Granted I’m from Philadelphia and I know the “Jersey douchebag”-type all too well, but still, I’m sure a lot of non-Philadelphians would laugh at the show too.

Watch from the bottom episode up.

I’ve been holding off on telling people about this because the 60 Minutes producer prefers that it be kept under wraps for the time being, but it appears that some other poker news sources are jumping at the opportunity to break this story. I don’t think I can reasonably sit on this any longer. Therefore, I am going to go ahead and just let the information out of the bag.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by 60 Minutes in conjunction with a reporter from the Washington Post regarding a story about the Absolute Poker scandal from last fall. I was told that they wanted Adanthar and myself for on-camera interviews with Steve Kroft. I later found out they were also interested in interviewing Michael Josem and Marco Johnson. Basically, I spent a little while on the phone with the producer and the Washington Post reporter and recapped the whole story as well as I could from memory. I talked about my involvement and contribution, along with all the other people who were involved.

After that conversation, I found out that 60 Minutes plans on going to a number of different locations. I’ve heard that Canada, Costa Rica and Las Vegas are all possible travel locations. I may or may not be meeting up with 60 Minutes in Costa Rica, if and when they come down. There’s also the possibility that I will end up on-camera in Atlanta.

In terms of agenda, I’ve been told that the goal is to “tell the story from soup to nuts.” I don’t really know if that means a negative agenda for online poker, but I get the feeling that it might. That means that this story is unlikely to be a good thing for online poker on the whole. I wish that programs like 60 Minutes would always tell the whole story (ie, get PokerStars involved, explain why some sites are secure and clean, etc), but I can’t really be sure that will happen. If I do end up on-camera, I will be sure to explain that this scandal was online poker’s “Enron” — ie, the biggest and worst scandal in the history of the industry. It is not a commonplace occurrence and people should not take it as such.

In terms of the “certainty” that this will get on the air… I’m not sure. I’ve been told that it’s definitely happening. But, considering that it has not been shot yet, anything is possible. And if it does end up on the air, I have no idea when that will be or what the 60 Minutes airing schedule looks like.

I’ll post more as I get more information.

EDIT: If you’d like to read the post that I made last October during the scandal, here’s a link: Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal.

I wrote about this back in the November/December timeframe when we started the project. See: (Post #1) (Post #2).

Just to update you, I think things have leveled off since we made some changes to thepokerdb and the BLUFF Magazine site in general. We’re retaining all of our gains, but our traffic has pretty much settled into a groove.

This is a wide image, but this is our relative traffic from search for the last few months:

The start of the graph is a little misleading because we’d just put Analytics on the site, but you can see how much we improved from mid-November until the end of the year. Since then, we’ve stayed about the same, albeit with some big swings along the way.

At this point, I think we have to move on to fix all of the things that are still wrong with the site. While we improved dramatically, we left some of the biggest problems unchanged. Hopefully we’ll get all of them in the 2nd go-round.

Good luck to us.

This is a followup to Website Success: Part One, Website Success: Part Two and Website Success: Part Three.

I ended the last post by saying that Firefox had penetrated the browser market, overcoming the inertia present in millions of Internet Explorer users. Let’s examine how and why that happened.

I believe that Firefox has taken such a large market share because of how it appealed to users. Not *that* it appealed, but how. Namely, it appealed to the human emotions that I stress so strongly. What do I mean by that? Well, I can think of a host of things that contributed.

First, security. People hear about worms, viruses, malware, etc. For a long-time, you would hear about how such and such worm is being spread across the internet by something like Outlook. I don’t really see it in the news as often, but during the period of heavy Firefox growth, I remember hearing about worms all the time. People were afraid of the unknown! I’ll bet that millions of people got infected by something they clicked on in Outlook and, after they fixed the problem, they said to themselves — I’m going to shore up my computer’s security. So then they probably downloaded all the free software they could find. Things like AdAware and Firefox blew up because of the security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer. Firefox made people feel safe and that was more than enough to knock millions of people off their previous IE path.

Second, open source. People root for the underdog. The Firefox About Us page says the following:

Mozilla is not a traditional software company. We are a global community and public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere.

We work in the open through a highly disciplined, transparent and cooperative process to coordinate the development and marketing of Mozilla technologies and products as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation has no outside shareholders. The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from federal income tax under IRC 501(c)3.

This unique structure enables Mozilla to financially support and cultivate competitive, viable community innovation. The result is great products built by passionate people — and better choices for everyone.

While I don’t think the “fight against microsoft” attitude was the primary reason for Firefox growth, there’s no doubt in my mind that lots of people take out their anger against Microsoft by using products like Firefox. As soon as there was good alternative to IE, people were gone. Don’t discount the negative press that Microsoft received for, literally, years as the DOJ’s antitrust case was proceeding. That case, in large part, revolved around Microsoft’s heavy-handed tactics with Internet Explorer and the subsequent crushing of Netscape. People have it in their minds that Internet Explorer is something from the “big corporation” and is being forced on them. That just doesn’t sit well. Firefox comes along as this progressive, open-source, non-profit organization that is “for the people.” That sells. That gets people to DO something. In the affiliate world, people would say “it converts.” And at the end of the day, it’s really converting on the basis of emotions, not necessarily functionality. Also, regardless of the Mozilla Foundation being non-profit, Firefox has tremendous value (I won’t get into the how of monetization stuff for now).

Third, don’t discount functionality. I don’t think it was a primary reason at all for Firefox’s rise, but it definitely factored in. A faster browser with tons of custom add-ons with tabbed browsing definitely helped Firefox. But those aren’t so much converting on the basis of emotion as the other factors above. Security is arguably functionality, but I would say that in this specific case, it really is more of an emotional factor than a purely functional one — the reason is that lots of people used IE safely, it wasn’t like it was “necessary” to have Firefox to avoid getting a virus. I suppose you could also argue that “happiness” or something like that is an emotional response to increased functionality, but that isn’t really what I’ve been harping on for the last few posts. When I say emotional response, I’m talking about things like fears, jealousy, curiousity, etc. The strongest motivators to get people to do things.

So that’s how Firefox broke through (in my opinion). I’ll continue this with some more case studies and hopefully additional insight. I know that everyone here is not an entrepreneur and not everyone cares about how to build websites and products that bring people in day after day, but this is what I do. So I enjoy blogging about it. The truth is, I could easily write a book about this type of thing. It might not be worthwhile for people to read, but I’m just saying I feel like I have that much stuff to say. So at some point I’ll cut this off and get on some other topic or whatever, but I hope these posts can inspire or help at least a few people out there to make truly great websites.