Steve Badger publishes a list of the most-trafficked non-cardroom poker sites on his poker seosite. I thought it might be interesting to put together a similar list of blackjack sites. One thing to keep in mind is that all of the sites that track website traffic (Compete, Alexa, Hitwise, and Quantcast) have a limited amount of usefulness and accuracy. But these are (as far as I know) the only tools you can use to get any kind of third-party estimate of which blackjack sites get the most traffic.
The blackjack sites that I looked at are only the ones dealing pretty much with blackjack exclusively. Obviously the Wizard of Odds gets a tremendous amount of traffic, but that's a general gambling site with a blackjack section, and I don't have ANY way of determining how much of his traffic is made up of blackjack traffic. Also, since blackjack isn't a separate vertical with any of these services, I've had to look these up based on my own knowledge of popular, well-trafficked blackjack information sites. If I've left anyone out, my apologies.
The blackjack sites listed below are in order of traffic as reported by Compete.com. The number reflects an estimate of monthly visitors calculated from August 2007 through August 2008.
Below the top 25:
Obviously, Quantcast has a different methodology, but between the two lists, you can get a pretty good idea of which blackjack sites get the most traffic. Card counting focused websites did see a spike over the last year because of the popularity of the movie 21, so in other time periods, those estimates might look dramatically different. A couple of things are pretty clear though:
HitOrStand.net is #1 on both lists. My guess is that this is a result of a couple of factors. For one thing, the site ranks extremely well in the search engines for phrases like "blackjack" and "online blackjack". For another thing, they offer a free game, so they get a lot of loyal, repeat traffic. It's a great site though, so I sure don't begrudge them their large amount of traffic.
Ken's site is a dinosaur among blackjack sites, and deservedly ranks extremely well in the search engines still. He has an active discussion forum at his site to bring in repeat traffic, and his basic strategy engine is probably popular with all sorts of blackjack players who have an inkling of what the game is about.
Another site that deserves its ranking and traffic. Not only is their card counting software program excellent, but the site, and all of the minisites and satellite sites associated with it, contain tons of excellent blackjack information.
I'm not sure that I have the self-discipline to update these rankings as often as Steve does his poker info site rankings, but I did think it would make a cool article. I welcome feedback and thoughts from others.
See also: