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Mahalo Launches Reviews and Ratings; CEO Shares Company Stats
Written by Allen Stern - March 19, 2008
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.
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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.
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...but what about costs for maintaining outgoing link quality?
with the addition of the browser tool and community feature their content has the potential to be way more useful than traditional search engines
algorithms are great but they are still not able to do many things people can. for example, how many garbage sites have you seen in the google search results?
500 per pages seems steep, but the long term value of that page to users and mahalo itself is priceless.
Hope you had a good time at SES, we created a page with some nice videos of the new features in action:
http://www.mahalo.com/My_Mahalo
Thomas to answer your question, we have internal tools to help us keep track of outgoing links. These tools check for things such as 404s or if the website is no longer online. Additionally we have some more processes for keeping existing pages up to date.
Mahalo!
Thanks Sean - I will add the link to the post. I hope you can make it to one of these events (leave Jason at home) so we can meet!
2,000 links in 2 months.
5,000 monthly active toolbar users.
4.2 million uniques (most apparently not from direct traffic).
200 message board posts a month.
Total cost: $16 million.
1 prima donna CEO. Priceless.
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