I had to post this here in order to warn any poker sites out there that might run into this advertising site. It’s gam bling ads DOT com (remove the spaces). They run advertising auctions and the highest bidder gets the ad space. I noticed they were getting some good ad rates so I contacted them about getting me some advertising for Poker Chip Tricks because the site gets a lot of traffic. Michael contacted me asking for monthly page views and unique visitors. I informed him in my first email back that the stats provided by my host sucked and the numbers were way too high. So I offered him the numbers provided by my Google Ads and those by Poker Blogs Topsite which are both real counts of each page loaded. He didn’t trust the data.

I had been looking into a good stats program for the site anyways so when I got one up and running I asked him how many days he’d like before I sent him some data. His reply came back telling me I had stats through my web host. Yes, I already knew this and informed him of that in my first email. My web host stats suck! He didn’t seem to be paying attention simply because he didn’t believe the traffic numbers I was telling him. So I gave in and saved the stats from my web host. Of course I took out all of the referrer data, numbers related to specific page view counts, visitor’s browser data, and everything else that he wouldn’t need. I gave him the raw stats for page view, visitor counts, daily counts, and all of those related numbers.

This guy comes back saying that the numbers should be a lot lower (I had told him many times the stats from my host were very inflated due to a horrible stats package), he’s tired of batting with me over simple things, and that we should part our ways. This pissed me off. I’ve tried to comply with his every request and didn’t want to send him bad data so I was giving him many alternatives which showed a lot truer numbers than the ones he wanted. I typed up an email back and was as nice as possible pointing out how I’d been doing what he asked (and more) since day one.

Among other things I wrote, “I can’t provide my referrer and the counts of how many times certain pages are viewed. That would be like KFC giving away their recipe for chicken.” Anyone in business on the Internet should understand this. If you give away your referrer data, search engine query data, and specific page view counts you might was well shut down your site. You’ve just given someone all the data they need to compete with your site.

He responded to many points. Here are a few highlights…

This whole time you could have provided Analog stats via Dreamhost but didn’t. I had to do a whois on your domain to find where you were hosted so I could show you how to look up the stats that it appeared you didn’t even know you had. (If you did you didn’t bother to say.)

Maybe he should have actually read my previous messages. I mentioned in just about every message that the stats from my web host were so out of whack I didn’t want to provide them and give him inflated numbers. And come on…a whois lookup takes 20 seconds. Stop acting like you put a stop to your entire day to look up where my site is hosted.

To my KFC comment he wrote…

Oh please. This is so stupid I’m not even going to reply to it.

Thanks for your time buddy and good luck running your business this way. The prick didn’t believe me from the day I sent in my application. After I provide page view and visitor data he now wants all my referrer data too? What a scam. Steer clear of gam bling ads DOT com!