CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
Mahalo Changes Payment Plan and Yes, Jason Mahalo is an SEO Play – I’ve Got Charts
Search engine Mahalo is changing their payment program to their guides beginning this Monday. Here’s the update from Mahalo, "Beginning Monday, January 14th, we will be assigning smaller dollar amounts to extremely short SeRPs or very fringe topic SeRPs that aren’t of high priority, and likewise, we will be assigning higher prices to SeRPs in especially difficult verticals or which are in high demand."
Makes sense to do the higher priority pages first, pay more for them and capitalize on the SEO referral traffic while the term is hot. When a story comes out, if Mahalo can get to it first, they might immediately rank 1st in Google based on the timing-changes Google has made. No information was provided on what the actual dollar amounts will change to – we will learn about those next week. Mahalo is also reporting today that they have passed the 25,000 search engine result pages mark. Congrats to the team including Sean Percival!
Let’s take yet another look at the SEO play topic. Anyone remember Jason Calacanis saying "SEO is Shit" at SES Chicago just over a year ago? Anyone remember Jason stating here on CN that "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." He then further stated his views on SEO here. I still stand firm that a percentage of traffic on Mahalo is actually employee/guide traffic.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is loving the Mahalo noting, "I find Mahalo a good place to start learning about many topics". Today we learn from Hitwise that Mahalo traffic is growing nicely. Hitwise has put together some charts and stats about Mahalo that show a great growth curve. At the end of the post, they note, "Mahalo receives most of its traffic from Search Engines (76% last week)". How could this NOT be a SEO play? If Jason was serious about not being interested in search engine referral traffic, then he could easily block it. Let’s not even touch the internal promotion of articles to the social news sites.
Hats off to the Mahalo team for their early success. I just hope that Jason will admit that Mahalo is a SEO play. Sure in 10 years Mahalo might not need Google/Yahoo to drive traffic, but it’s clear today that they do and are maximizing the pages they create to use Google to their advantage. You see, Google changed some of their rankings so that new posts appear at the top even with no inbound links. Mahalo knows this and so if they continue to create pages for the hot terms, then they will rank well. Of course Jason will say that they are creating the pages because his visitors care about that content, but c’mon, let’s speak like they do on 86th street and Bay Parkway Jason.
And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a SEO play – Wikipedia’s been doing it for years.
Otis over at Simpy asked for someone to pull some charts from Compete so I did. Here are a few samples of Mahalo’s traffic:
Search for Vanessa Hudgens Photos:
Search for Halo Skulls:
And here is a list of the top 25 search engine keywords that drive traffic to Mahalo:
It’s fine to be an SEO play – just apologize for calling it shit and dead. Come out of the SEO closet Jason, we will all love ya a bit more.
[...] 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 [...]
So Jason you are claiming pages on google are junked up with advertising but pages on Mahalo are not? Such a condescending remark considering at one time you claimed Mahalo could run for several years with out the needs for advertising yet now there are ads on every page. And probably still more to come.
I well remember after sitting down to find all the skulls in Halo 3 doing a Goog search on it and having Mahalo come up as the first result. Kind of insane when you think about how many other gaming sites had FAQs up first.
Interesting numbers though.
Actually, we bought the game and found all the Skulls at midnight that night BEFORE any of the other sites had their content up!
In the video game space, if you take a look, we’re doing real content. I know, I said we would never do content… :-)
Check out Call of Duty Enemy Intels… we found all of those and RECORDED VIDEOS of the locations!
Mahalo is making content now in select areas where we “can help” like How To articles, news, and video games.
So, if it helps you can think about Mahalo as 1/3rd Google, 1/3rd Wikipedia, and 1/3rd Weblogs, Inc.
We also reserve the right to change our mission every eight weeks as we learn more about what helps people. (i.e. adding Mahalo social!).
best j
You need something because it is a hot search term, thus someone is being paid more to create content for hotter search terms.
That equates at least partially to paying people based on how much traffic they will eventually bring in, though hopefully you also make revenue a factor and how much you are making on clicks.. potentially.
I think it is great that you are training all these people how to create content that ranks well.
Then all a marketer needs to do is teach them how to do it for themselves and make more money with their own content sites.
How are you going to introduce a “noble cause” like Wikipedia has to get people to stay?
Jason,
As a test, I disabled the URL toolbar in firefox and replaced it with the Mahalo Social toolbar, relying solely on the Mahalo search box for my browsing experience. I am very happy with the results because at the very worst, I have a clean version of the major search engines aggregated in one spot. I think that your original content is top notch and while I have criticized the $3MM in annual expense related to your guides, can understand how it makes the Mahalo experience better.
On a side note, I would really like to see Mahalo move into lyrics SeRPs. Many of the result pages in Google are servicable, but junked up with advertising which makes the user experience subpar. IMHO, building a strategic partnership with Amazon to provide links for both digital and physical copies of the artists music on the SeRP, would make for a solid revenue stream.
Oh Allen I can’t live the lie any more!! You’ve got me… you had me from hello…. I can’t deny what we share anymore Allen… I’m an SEO just like you and I can’t hide it anymore! Please love me for who I am!!! Can i get hug!!?
:-)
Seriously, we are making more content than we thought we would (how to articles, news articles, and video game articles). We thought we would be 10% content and we’re more like 30%. The content is great quality and a small % of it is getting indexed well because they are very high quality pages.
However, the real story is the growth of the social network and the traffic and content generated by it. I’m sure you’ll be writing that one in another six months.
Don’t stop believing!
j
Jason – we are both Knicks fans – isn’t that enough? I could just picture the fun Valleywag would have of us hugging.
:)
I’m not crazy about the socialness you added – nor am I excited about it on Wikia – though yours is better than Wikia’s so far.
I find it funny or coincidental that I just stamped my approval of Mahalo recently. All of sudden Marshall writes a love fest on RWW. Is it fate or destiny that all Mahalo needed was a little love from Rex and Marshall to suceed.
hhahaha… I’m so full of myself today as I’m a bit tired.
Great investigative reporting again done CN style. That’s why I keep saying – by year’s end you’ll be nearer to the top of the pack.
Keep up the great blogging! No Lazysphere man!
Rex
hmm – I was trying to say that it was similar in that you get paid for "hot" – but I understand that might be confusing – let me edit the original post.
you said different but similar.. how is it similar? Nick’s payment plan is to drive bloggers to game the system and get more page views so they can make more money. our payment plan is based on how much work it takes to make the page and if we need the page in the index or not.
I don’t see any similar…. except maybe that it is not fixed.
thats why i said it was different than gawkers!
the payment system ISN’T based on traffic at all. It’s based on a) how long the page takes to create and b) how much we need the page.
If the page gets 1 pageview or 1m people get paid the same amount.
best j
lol – i can try harder next time if you like
Allen,
Thanks Allen, not nearly as negative as I was expecting. :) I’ll let Jason address the SEO claims if he gets a chance to read this.
Sean
Very nice, but what about this?
Mahalo suspended the account of their most prominent Mentor and still refuses to pay him, citing conditions not previously indicated.