Mahalo

Last week marked the apparent end of one man's blogging career. Most believe that it is a hoax but I know that this individual would never use trickery or magic potions to get more traffic to his startup. This person has created a mailing list to more effectively communicate with his network. I can't link to the mailing list because it was capped at 500 1,000 1,100. Steven Hodson has deciphered the email for the rest of us.

I wasn't planning on posting about this topic but I just received a video from the "blogger king" at the "blogger information network" - apparently there is a program to actually effectively quit blogging. Anyway have a look below and you decide for yourself. The full email blast is located here.

We initially reviewed blog directory Blogged earlier this year. It's a human curated blog directory that provides a (somewhat bogus) score for each blog. Today Blogged is back with their launch of a news portal site. Blogged editors will pull breaking news and the most compelling stories from their content categories (technology, entertainment, sports, etc.) and then displays the stories on the frontpage.

Here is how Blogged compares itself to the other news sites like Google News and Yahoo News along with the "meme trackers" like TechMeme:

Google News and Yahoo News feature top stories from traditional news sources using a combination of technology and human editors. Memetrackers such as Techmeme and Blogrunner use algorithms to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers related to a particular industry. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories daily from across the Web as saved and voted on by individuals. Blogged.com is the only community that features the top qualified stories, representing all popular topics, organized by categories from around the blogosphere, combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

Today's launch by Blogged seems very similar to what Blogrunner offers except that it's human curated versus machine-driven. From a gathering the news standpoint, it's basically like Mahalo. Both Mahalo and Blogrunner create tag pages, Mahalo uses their staff and volunteers to find links, Blogrunner uses computers to find the links. Blogged seems to be more in the Mahalo style but without the tag pages.

I don't know how large the Blogged team is, but my only question is whether they be able to stay on top of all of the breaking news across so many categories and be able to bubble up the news in (near) real-time? If so, awesome. Also, I hope they will provide diversity in the blogs that they pimp.

They should add a social layer on top of the news - since they know a lot about each blog, there's a wealth of information they could layer on top of the news and create a community effect on top of the news.

Everyone consumes news in different ways and the one-page category portal-style overveiew should work well for a mainstream audience.

With Yahoo signing away their advertising business today to Google, I thought it would be interesting to look at the major search engines and see who handles their advertising. Have a look at the list below and check out just how dominant Google is. You wonder why no one is using the other search engines -- it's easy, if the search engine can't sell ads, perhaps their technology isn't as good either, right? Please add other engines in the comments and I will add them to the list.

	Company	Advertising Partner	Notes
	Google	Google
	Yahoo	Yahoo/Google	Google ads to begin in three months.
	Ask	Google
	Microsoft	Microsoft
	YouTube	Google
	AOL	Google
	Facebook	n/a	Facebook runs their "social ads".
	hakia	Yahoo	Per the conference call today, hakia will now be able to run Google ads as well
	Mahalo	Google	Mahalo no longer claims to be a search engine
	Wikia	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	Twerq	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	MySpace	Google
	a9	Amazon	Ads are related items from Amazon.com

Yesterday we learned that Brijit has closed its doors (at least temporarily). When I interviewed Founder & CEO Jeremy Brosowsky back in December, one of the topics we discussed was my concern about their business model. Trying to pay a staff (in this case writers) with CPC advertising is very difficult. I'd like to note that my conversation with Jeremy was one of my favorites to-date; Jeremy is a very bright guy.

As I thought about Brijit some more last night, Mahalo came to mind. Mahalo utilizes a similar structure to Brijit in that they have a team of writers and link scrapers who scour the Internet for the latest hot topic to create Mahalo pages for. Brijit created article abstracts which is similar to the content Mahalo creates around a topic. Mahalo adds a variety of links on the topic while Brijit only linked to the original source article. Mahalo has also created many "how-to" articles which are much more in-depth and pay more (some are up to $150 per how-to).

One of the differences between Brijit and Mahalo is that Mahalo has very strong search engine rankings. CEO Jason Calacanis has become a master SEO and this will help Mahalo over the long-term. Brijit didn't have good search engine rankings and I think this was a major factor in their lack of ability to generate revenue. Calacanis does an excellent job in "sending" pagerank to Mahalo through his very authoritative calacanis.com blog. Calacanis also has 20,000+ Twitter followers and each time he posts a link to Mahalo, some percentage (my guess is 2-4%) will click through. Both of these traffic drivers require no marketing expenditure which can help to drive the ROI up. Mahalo relies on two types of traffic: search engines and Calacanis' shills - both on his blog and on Twitter.

Brijit paid a flat rate $5/abstract while Mahalo pays both full-time salaries to its in-house employees and a sliding scale to it's freelancers. While most of the pages on Mahalo will take years to return the money invested to create the pages, a few gems should be able to take care of the load. My guess is that their 100+ Grand Theft Auto 4 walkthrough pages will be some of those gems. Mahalo is banking on the gems.

Last month we learned that Mahalo workers need to write more words to capture more search engine rankings and we also learned that Mahalo is testing affiliate relationships as a way to increase revenue.

Mahalo has already started to push link research to the "free" community. I imagine we will see more pushed to the free side to maximize the ROI over time.

If Mahalo staffers aren't looking at why Brijit didn't work, they should. It could provide some valuable insight in how to avoid similar issues from affecting Mahalo.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis had a busy week last week. We learned of three major Mahalo updates: they are now a research engine, if you want to get paid you must write more and link less, SEO is critical for the success of the research engine.

Mahalo is no longer a search engine as it was classified upon the initial launch nearly a year ago. Calacanis is now calling his company a "research engine". While I don't think it's a search engine, it's not a research engine either. The closest thing I could compare it to is a combo of delicious plus a couple paragraphs of juicy content.

When Mahalo launched, I asked Calacanis whether the site was created for the purpose of driving traffic through search engines. He noted, "Are we an SEO master? If Google wants to index us well that's fine with us, but our model is not based on being well indexed in Google or Yahoo. Our model is in creating human curated search results that are very helpful to users." MORE »

Today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is launching a new feature: product/service reviews and ratings. I sat down with Jason yesterday to discuss the new feature and here are my notes. Jason began by explaining that many of the current Mahalo pages are about an 8/10 in terms of quality, his goal is to make sure every page on Mahalo is a 10/10. He also shared that they currently have between 400-500 how-to pages and the cost to create one how to page is approximately $500.

The new feature launching today allows Mahalo users to rate and review products where Mahalo has created a page. This includes music, movies, books, trips, local merchants, etc. I've included some screenshots below.

If you have installed the Mahalo toolbar, you will see the reviews and ratings on search result pages on Google and Yahoo when you search for an item that has reviews or ratings. This has the potential to be a strong mashup for Mahalo as it could draw users into Mahalo that normally would jump to Yelp or Amazon for a review after completing an initial search. Jason said his goal is to create a "better page" than Google or Yahoo can do alone.

Each user is assigned a trust score and that score determines the weight that a review and rating will carry in the system. Users will need a certain number of links to hit the frontpage and Jason noted that some users will receive "power ranking" status.

The system can import reviews from other services including GoodReads for books. I asked about exporting content back to other services and the reply was, "soon".

I also asked Jason to share some stats about Mahalo:

• 3 full-time staff focused solely on reviewing contributed links
• Jan/Feb - 10k links were submitted, 20% approved
• 5,000 users actively using the Mahalo toolbar daily
• 4.2 million uniques last month to Mahalo, they are working on increasing the direct traffic to the site
• 200 message board posts in January

Related: Check out all of our Mahalo coverage including the launch of sponsored affiliate links on Mahalo.

Today I had the opportunity to sit down with Tyler Crowley and Jason Calacanis from Mahalo to review their updates which launch tomorrow. My article regarding the updates goes live at 2:30 Eastern on Wednesday, so be here! Below is one update that Jason provided regarding the Mahalo business model.

Much has been made about Jason's presentation at the affiliate summit last month. So it's interesting that the business model update is around affiliates and affiliate revenue. Jason explained that Mahalo has added affiliate links where they make sense. Currently they are working with Amazon and Commission Junction. Links are added by the Mahalo guides and greenhouse workers as they create the pages.

He provided a couple of examples:

• $15 CPA for Big Brother live streaming signups on their Big Brother page
• $2 CPA for signups to New York magazine on their Lindsay Lohan page

My guess is that within 2-3 months, 80-90% of pages on Mahalo will have at least one affiliate link. Jason mentioned that they are double-noting that the links are sponsored. I would suggest that the Mahalo audience doesn't get the difference because the links look exactly the same as the non-affiliate links. Here is an example of the sponsored links section:

The majority of pages on Mahalo are "rich" for advertising. With that said, affiliate revenue could surpass Google AdSense revenue for Mahalo in the long-term. Check out our previous Mahalo coverage.

Earlier today, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis came out with 17 ways to save money running a business. He calls them "really good tips" - There are a couple of good ones on there like buying good chairs for employees but the majority of them show that working at Mahalo is like prison. In fact, I hear an electrified fence is going up in the coming weeks when they get the Series B funding. It's also important to understand that entrepreneurs do not always make great leaders.

continue reading »

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs 2.0 service Mahalo, has apparently left the world of pissing off SEO folk and is now pissing off affiliate folk. This time he wonders if the search engines (including Google, Yahoo and Mahalo) should ban affiliate links from being indexed. First, how would anyone even know it's an affiliate link? I don't have a reaction here though if a gun was held to me, I would say that they should be banned or if they are indexed, it should be noted that it's an affiliate link.

However, after reading Jason's article about the potential banning of affiliate links it got me wondering about the way Jason links to Mahalo on his blog and the way he pushes his employees to also blog and spread the word of Mahalo.

On calacanis.com, nearly every single post has a link to Mahalo which is competely acceptable seeing as Calacanis is the CEO. But should these links have the nofollow attribute on them? Aren't they paid links? Sure, there's no direct payment but seeing as calacanis.com has a pagerank of 6, each time Jason links to a Mahalo page, he is passing the page some very heavy weight. In fact, it's been reported that 76% of Mahalo's traffic is coming from Google so naturally this type of linking is helping push Mahalo up the ranks in Google. In my opinion, he should nofollow every one of the Mahalo links.

In fact, employee links might actually be worse than affiliate links as they provide a direct benefit to the company whereas affiliate links only provide a true benefit when the user completes some action.

Furthermore, on the Greenhouse mailing list (that is the list for part-time Mahalo page creators), the executives from Mahalo constantly ask the list to push out the pages to their blogs and their social services. Should these links be labeled? Here is an example of the employee push on Mahalo:

everyone go ahead and share this with Mahalo Share!
http://www.mahalo.com/Grammy_Winners_2008

Mahalo is just one example, this happens across the Web with employees pushing products or services of the companies they are employed by. What do you think? Should employees of sites be able to "push" their sites and pass the juicy search credit or is this just as bad as any other paid link?

This will be my question for him at next week's SES in NYC.

Last week we wrote about the new payment plan being instituted by Mahalo. Today Mahalo has revealed the pages that are currently paying the highest, and the price for every page they are looking to create. Here is how the Community Manager explains the pricing change, "We look at the demand for the search term, the size of the serp, and the amount of research (time) one might need to spend to do it justice. So, the lower priced SeRPs *take less time to do.* This is a critical point -- it means that stubs (very short SeRPs with a handful of links) are now open for the Greenhouse to create."

Stubs are getting in the $1 per pricing just for quick Google rankings for Mahalo. Looks like the average is about $5-7/page. There are 1400 pages listed in the system to be created.

check out the pricing charts »