metaViper

There are two key components to any valuable web site: its content popularity and traffic. Design is also important, but I’ve visited many poorly designed sites that enjoy thousands of visitors every day so I won’t focus on that now. This article will focus primarily on content popularity.

Many of you are site owners or bloggers trying to build presence and authority. Let’s take a look at a couple of widely known web sites: Blizzard.com and the home page of their wildly successful MMORG, WorldofWarcraft.com.

Below is a drill-down of statistics generated by popuri.us for each site:

Blizzard.com (12 years old)	WorldofWarcraft.com (7 years old)

The Google PageRank, Alexa, Compete, and QuantCast ranks indicate that WorldofWarcraft.com is the more popular site because each number in this area is lower for WoW. Interestingly, two of the three search engines indicate there are more backlinks to Blizzard.com, perhaps because it’s had more time to attract link love. Then with the last three statistic Technorati, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Bloglines subscribers, WorldofWarcraft is the clear winner. What surprised me here is that Blizzard.com has no Bloglines subscribers. Looks like an opportunity to advertise/create a company RSS feed!

World of Warcraft enjoys a gigantic userbase with over 6 million subscribers and clearly they’re linking back to the game site and finding its content very valuable. Both sites are popular but WoW has outpaced its parent, as children are wont to do :-}

dnScoop happens to agree with this analysis valuing Blizzard.com at $8,932,000 and WorldofWarcraft.com at $10,693,200 !

In the beginning it was an exciting and rich experience. I could enter an online reality where millions of other people were eager to casually mingle. That can be a rarity in the real world, where we seem to frequently be “busy” with no time for “games”. A year and a half passed while I happily leveled up three characters in World of Warcraft (WoW).

On some of my days off from work I would wake up, start gaming and only stop when my eyes were glazed over. During the day I’d only turn away to eat or for bio breaks. Phone calls from family and friends seemed to become an annoyance because it would detract from my complete concentration on WoW. After all, a second can be the difference between casting a healing spell in time and death.

Then one day as I began my adventures through the dark portal I started to realize (more…)