Today, we present the 2023 Company Performance by Audience Readership for Cigar Coop. This is a very simple metric – how do cigar companies rate in terms of the readership on Cigar Coop The Magazine (the brand name for the Cigar Coop website). This year, we rank the 25 “most-read” companies on Cigar Coop for 2023.
This is a very important data-gathering exercise for Cigar Coop. It shows what companies our readers are most interested in and what type of coverage they seek.
A report was run on the 500 most-read articles on Cigar Coop to determine this. These articles are not 2023-specific but are the 500 most-read articles regardless of publication year. Articles considered included news, reviews, feature stories, podcast articles, and events. Articles that were not specific to a company were removed from the dataset. Then, each article was sorted by company and counted up. The Smoking Syndicate’s content published on Cigar Coop was included in this data set.
The total page views related to a specific company were tabulated. Once the tabulations were completed, the results were sorted by which company had the most page views.
For this exercise, we considered only the top 25 companies ranked on page views.
NOTE: This reflects ARTICLES and does not include banner advertising.
Cigar Coop 2023 Audience Readership
| 2023 Rank | Company | 2022 Rank | 2021 Rank |
| 1 | Scandinavian Tobacco Group (STG) (x) | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Drew Estate | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | Tabacalera USA | 3 | 3 |
| 4 | Rocky Patel | 5 | 5 |
| 5 | Davidoff | 4 | 4 |
| 6 | Arturo Fuente | 6 | 8 |
| 7 | Tatuaje | 8 | 7 |
| 8 | Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust | 10 | 10 |
| 9 | Perdomo | 9 | 13 |
| 10 | Gurkha | 18 | 29 |
| 11 | Padron | 14 | 25 |
| 12 | JC Newman | 13 | 12 |
| 13 | Espinosa | 17 | 26 |
| 14 | My Father | 12 | 27 |
| 15 | Plasencia | 22 | 36 |
| 16 | CLE | 15 | 9 |
| 17 | Oliva | 19 | 50 |
| 18 | AJ Fernandez | 11 | 14 |
| 19 | SP1014 | 45 | – |
| 20 | Oscar Valladares | 33 | 20 |
| 21 | Quesada | 25 | 72 |
| 22 | Los Caidos | — | — |
| 23 | Esteban Carreras | 29 | 35 |
| 24 | Boutique Blends | 36 | 57 |
| 25 | Joya de Nicaragua | 23 | 22 |
x – Includes General and Forged
General Findings
- A total of 84 companies had Top 500 cigar articles read in 2023. In 2022, there were 85.
- The Top Ten consists of nine companies that have been in business for ten years or more.
- The“Big Four” (Drew Estate, General, Davidoff, and Altadis) occupied the top four of the top 5 spots. Of the Top 500, a total of 38.1% of overall traffic came from these companies (up from 34.4%)
- STG’s numbers included Alec Bradley’s numbers as they acquired the brand. The past three years have seen extremely close numbers between STG and Drew Estate. Incorporating Alec Bradley pushed STG further ahead of Drew Estate in 2023.
- With Alec Bradley now a part of STG, Gurkha has pushed into the top ten. On top of that, Gurkha made a significant jump.
- SP1014 is the brand owned by Sanj Patel. Despite only two articles, this brand has pushed all the way up to #18. This brand has considerable traction from the YouTube community and has carried over to our traffic for those articles.
- Our data continues to show our audience has little interest in the TAA. Only 1.4% of the traffic came from these cigars.
- Our data continues to show our audience has little interest in single-store releases. Only 1.2% of the traffic came from these cigars.
