Jason Calacanis wants to inject what he calls the “Skeeball economy” into Mahalo, his highly tuned site for creating and searching topic pages. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference). Since launching Mahalo two years ago, his staff and free workers on the Web (AKA, the Mahalo community) have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in Google search (about two thirds of his traffic comes from search engines). But Mahalo is hitting a ceiling in page creation because the wiki approach is just too slow and complicated. So it is launching a completely new design which makes it much easier to create pages and—here is the Skeeball part—rewards people with “Mahalo Dollars.”
These Mahalo Dollars, which Calacanis first started distributing in his Q&A site Mahalo Answers, can be converted into real money at an exchange rate of 75 cents to the dollar or can be saved up to spend in Mahalo itself in the future. Calacanis saw all the activity that was happening on Mahalo Answers, which he says broke one million users last month, and wanted to bring that over to Mahalo proper. Now anyone can claim a topic and create a search results page around that topic or keyword. There is one editor per page and Mahalo will split the AdSense revenues 50/50 for any page he or she makes and maintains. A typical page could generate $20 to $50 a year. If you make 100 of those, that turns out to be some nice pocket change.
The more pages you make, the more points you get and can climb from being a white belt to a black belt. With each new level, you get more privileges. At some point, members will be able to buy and sell pages they have claimed (for Mahalo Dollars, of course). In order to make page creation easier, Mahalo will now assist editors by turning up appropriate links, images, videos, news stories, questions and answers, and more. All you have to do is put in a search term, pick which elements should appear on the official topic page, and write up a short description. It is all driven by APIs in an attempt to bring the appropriate information to editor’s fingertips. Mahalo needs to go from 100,000 topic pages to millions of them, and fast. It is using these semi-automated approaches to get there.
Whether or not these will produce the best pages on any given topic remains to be seen. One problem I see is that claiming a topic and the associated revenues will be on a first-come, first serve basis. If someone comes along later with better domain expertise on, say, sushi (see screenshot below), he or she is out of luck. So there will be a bit of a land grab. With that, there is certainly a danger that people will shift from making spam pages to Mahalo pages. Calacanis dismisses this possibility. He notes that spammers will always be able to make more money on their own and that there are too many tripwires in Mahalo’s system to make it worth their while. Plus, Mahalo will yank any pages it deems too spammy.
The bigger challenge for him is to get people to come to Mahalo on their own instead of through search engines. People who come from search engines tend to be drive-by traffic. They look at 1.5 pages then leave. People who come directly or through referring sites look at 4 to 5 pages per visit. Calacanis is doing a lot to get more people to come to his site. Now he needs to get them to stay.
Can’t wait to see the new version!
Mahalo, that is a nice touch to reward writers. With the world of Mahalo and Wikipedia coming together, Google Knol’s impact is disappearing. One day Wikipedia will go extinct too, and Mahalo will stay afloat because it rewards writers–as simple as that.
Here’s the problem with that logic: People contribute to Wikipedia because they WANT to contribute. Pocket change is nice, but it creates the wrong incentive, brings in the marketers looking to sell the next best thing to clients, and who knows when the money train will run dry?
Wikipedia will likely continue to win the day.
Yea, Mahalo beting wikipedia! Somebody has NO clue.
(Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference)
stop kisssing jason ass since jason is an ass
Can’t wait to see Mahalo 2.0!
Yeah there is definitely the computer industry maxim here that stipulates “never go for version one of a new piece of software” in action… that rule has been not slightly, but completely subverted in the web2.0 era (read: permanent beta stage) but we need early adopters to iron it out for the rest of us, and that can’t be a bad thing…
typo: Calacanis is doing a lot to get more people to come to hi[s] site. Now he needs to get them to stay.
Isnt that hawaiian for goodbye?
It’s the hawaiian way to say ‘thank you’.
No, that’s ‘aloha.’ Mahalo is Hawaiian for ‘thank you’
This is what happens when dumb VC’s drop cash on stupid startups. Blowing cash just to get people to use their site.
If no one’s been using your site for two years and you have millions in the bank, give it up and return the VC cash.
Actually, this model seems to lend itself to something important – cash flow
It only spends money if it makes money. The advantages of working with Mahalo are probably SEO power, simplicity of tossing it on the web, etc.
I’m personally not convinced by trying to get users to view more pages on the site. The overall goal is to get content, information, and answers to the person searching. By using Google and then going to mahalo, if they leave quickly then they will avoid going to mahalo’s homepage and then subsequently leaving after finding the page they wanted.
Mahalo, seriously?
Buy the book: The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
http://www.amaz...8113&sr=8-1
How come you honoured the NDA for this announcement?
How do you not mention “Squidoo” in this review?
This is a spammy, horrible approach that will be just as mediocre as the rest of Mahalo.
Yeah, this is basically what Squidoo has been doing for years now.
And HubPages even more successfully…
So what’s new? The Mahalo Greenhouse already paid users for creating pages, oh but wait that was back when Mahalo was still supposed to be a search engine. Now JC calls is a wiki or is it a wiki-engine now Jason?
I still don’t see why Google indexes the link bait pages, they should cut Mahalo off at it’s knees and be done with it.
Losing the Google connection would (in the initial period hurt their traffic, but…) long term be better for them.
Reading further comments reveals that many people think this is not a very clever idea, but actually I think it is but am sceptical about how it could turn a profit.
The way it’s described is a combination of the LOCAL information services offered by Google/Yahoo/MSN and aggregating all this information can’t be a bad idea. Not using search algorithms is a decision of potential genius, but slows it down compared to full automation.
Web2.0 user generated content should be able to generate momentum of its own.
wow! seems like the end of road attempt to save the company. add them to the deadpool!
Not very positive comments, poor Jason and his Jasonites will be upset. Or is it Jason Nation? yes thats it I think.
I’m sure we’ll hear loud and clear from the JasonNation, they can’t stand to hear bad things about their leader…
Gotta say I love this passage
“have built about 100,000 topic pages that tend to rank highly in Google search (about two thirds of his traffic comes from search engines).”
Mahalo is and always will be nothing but a huge SEO/SEM play.
“Mahalo is and always will be nothing but a huge SEO/SEM play.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
The sad part is that if you build it they will not come.This is a great way to drive traffic and an
incentive($$$) to visit Mahalo .
The key is from “What would Google do ?” is to build fast and fix with iterations.Beta is not bad!
Kudos to Calacanis for innovating.
One thing you cannot accuse Jason of is innovating, Hubpages and squidoo have been doing this for years. As with Mahalo Answers, Calacanis gets a huge amount if publicity (most of which from Techcrunch) for rolling out poor clones of other more successful sites.
I wonder why they honored the NDA agreement which expired 42 mins ago instead of posting the news once they found out? I thought TC said they violate NDA’s now?
interesting – it’s worth a try…will attract some peeps for sure http://www.slicefinder.com
Glad to see a company stick their neck out there with a monetization strategy. Better than being a part of the valley parlour game of “how will they make money” like Digg and Twitter are.
Just because Squidoo does something similar, doesn’t mean Mahalo can’t do the same thing, if not improve upon it. There are many examples of monetization strategies pioneered by 1 company, then out executed by another. Remember, GoTo/Overture pioneered CPC, but then Google came along…
User generated content is going to evolve into user generated income in some fashion. Why should the companies hosting the UGC enjoy all the spoils?
Go Mahalo!
It’s a slick idea that could really take off. Good on him.
Thanks for the positive feedback… we think it’s going to work well, and if Mahalo Answers is any indicator the virtual currency + content creators is a great model.
It’s going to take time but I think we’ll get from 5m uniques a month to 10m…. and when we do it will be a very big deal.
Seriously? You’re only getting 5m uniques a month, with a goal of 10m? My nightmare-hellhole-troll wiki gets 30-35m uniques a month.
Just throw up a mediawiki instance with no rules and you’re done.
1. Mahalo is no Squidoo because they have extensive methods in place to limit spam.
2. This is likely to succeed because we’re in a down economy with lots of people that are sidelined and would likely take a stab at creating a bunch of pages.
3. People that spend hours creating pages will tell all their friends about Mahalo so there’s something of a viral effect here.
4. What’s with the personal attacks on the CEO? Judge the product for what it is and get off the personal BS.
Roman,
This is the comment section of TechCrunch… attacking the CEO of the company in question *is* the point. :-p
seriously, good points….. but please don’t bring up facts… the haters hate them!
all the best, jason
Agreed dont hate the player hate the game!
Clever concept which will be interesting to watch.
could it be because they’re not seeing any growth?
http://siteanal...com/mahalo.com/
A few issues:
- Sequoia is a Mahalo investors. Until recently, Mike Moritz was a Google board member
- Mahalo to share revenue with writers – there’s a conflict of interest here – Mahalo pays writers a rev share. Google Pays Mahalo the revenue. The higher Mahalo pages rank, the more revenue Google gets, the more writers get
- People talk a ton about Googles sponsored listings (and monetization) – but no one ever talks about the indexing and good placement of all those pages WITH sponsored listings in the ALGORITHMIC layer.
I don’t know…..maybe Mahalo wants to incentivize writers to stuff pages with keywords, spam Google (aka rank good on google), and split the spam rev share.
There launch is EXTREMELY buggy. I tried to register, now everytime I change pages I am automagically logged in as a different user (who never has a confirmed email, so posting responses is impossible).
Luckily I only have acces to accounts that don’t have a registered email, so no money on them.
Lots of people are missing points etc, the bug list is huge.
- not able to create new accounts
- people losing points, real money
and more, I didn’t read through all the list
Actually, I’m surprised…27+ comments, one link to compete, non to quantcast…and they are *quantified* so it’s real data:
http://www.quan...alo.com#traffic
>one million users
*No*. That’s *one million visitors* to their Q&A section…after the sixty + startups I’ve worked with in the last ~3.5 years, AND running a site that gets (cough) more US traffic than Mahalo, which happens to be a Q&A site..
Time will tell if this helps to steer them away from the iceberg I see in their quantcast charts. Q&A didn’t. And, as others mentioned, why would this graft people away from hubpages & squidoo? Or countless other sites like suite101, etc, that have been around for nearly a decade?
I’ll be sure to bury all their Digg attempts, including hubpages, examiner, etc.
servers down :/
Seems like a for-profit alternative to Wikipedia. There are certainly many freelancers out there that would love to own a topic or two.
thinly veiled SEO traffic strategy + Ponzi Scheme + Spammy search results = bad idea and waste of VC money
mark i can’t help but feel you dont really get it
there are so many websites like these coming up nowadays.we create content,they grow,we get small chunk.
This Mahalo/Squidoo/Hub-Pages approach isn’t meant to work – most likely you’ll end up with a quickly hatched up page that’s made just for money, and/or to drive traffic to marketers’ websites.
In the internet marketing community, the first thing they teach you is to make squidoo lenses or hubpages quickly for traffic and back links. The kind of content on those sites is horrible…
Potentially there’s a good amount of money in a large community of users creating information pages. Look at About.com and the others.
Over the life of a page Mahalo might make an average of $2 through adsense or whatever they’re using. If they can figure out the total all-in cost of creating that page (including their overhead, hosting, etc) is $1 then they’re essentially printing money and it makes good business sense over time.
I can venture a guess that if 75% of their users are only looking at 1.5 pages each those same users probably aren’t clicking on very many ads but instead just bouncing back to the google SERP. I managed the marketing and revenue for a site with a TON of drive-by google traffic and CTR was abysmal.
So that tells you that quality is an important factor in these pages and in making them profitable. That is a good thing, I think very few of these sites wanting UGC for SEO/$ reasons are adding any value and are instead just playing a shell game, and should not be rewarded for it.
It’s an interesting play, agree with Erick it’s problematic if people squat on topics, which sounds as uncomfortable as I intended it to sound.
We’re in the Q&A space and it’s packed, needs some shaking up, well done JC.
I like the new look. Mahalo is looking more and more like Yahoo but with UGC.
Now the site will become spammers haven, no doubt about it. Almost all of the adsense revenue sharing sites suck.
Jason needs to read Predictably Irrational.
With his virtual currency, he’s turned Mahalo sites into being affected by market norms versus the social norms that sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers use. Cash can work as a disincentive if not used properly and his sites are going to struggle because he doesn’t understand how to leverage social incentives properly.
The wiki community can do a lot in terms of content. It frequently just needs a push with automation in order to help develop stub content, which users can build from much more easily. When I’ve created pages on Mahalo, the basic build just feels so… pathetic when compared to say wikiHow and AboutUs.
The big wikis that are not WP that are listed on http://s23.org/...argest_html.php all have some sort form of automation to help build stub content.
If I were part of the community, I might feel more inclined to help and create content. I help edit on AboutUs, improve my page and other pages, hang out in the support chat. Mahalo? Nope. Why? The value isn’t there. It isn’t worth the time. I have over 100 links on Mahalo. In the past month? I’ve received 12 visits from Mahalo. The value isn’t there for me as some one promoting my content. (And the content isn’t there for me as a user. Niche content isn’t covered well. Google. After seeing if my niche content I can’t find links to on Fan History.)
It’s interesting you bring up the first-come, first-served issue. This is exactly the problem with other user-generated topic page arrangements – they are a quick fix with huge future potential problems. Technorati rolled this out several months ago and no one (incl. Techcrunch) batted an eye.
Decent Idea. revenue sharing concept is good
what is this mumbo jumbo hype nonesense you’re talkin. You sound erudite, but make no point.
Anyway, the bottom line is Mahalo is a nobody and is fledgling around with basic ideas instead of really innovating. they should just release their tools as another SEO site-generator script lol!
This is actually a very interesting post.
I didn’t knew about Mahalo, and I just find myself
joining to the community and creating a Mahalo-Page for my hobby
Thanks for that!
Incentivized spamming
I say the guy is trying to create a model that contributors and the publisher both benefit from and thats a good thing.
When will Mahalo pay to visit their site?
That’s only the next step.
Q. How did Wikipedia get to the top of the Google results and become a top-10 website?
A. By not ever thinking about Google results and not caring about becoming a top-10 website – we just got on with creating something worth having.
Of course, Jason has long advocated Wikipedia fill itself with ads. With a track record like his, we’ll be sure to take such advice as seriously as is warranted.