Alexa Archive

This discussion is about four topics related to Mahalo (and the general Internet):

1. Is Mahalo a clone of Hakia Gallery?
2. Corporate social tool usage
3. Where does Mahalo get their high Alexa ranking from?
4. Positive employee feedback and encouragement from management

Mahalo: A Hakia Clone?

Last week I met with semantic search engine Hakia.  One of the features they demo’ed to me is the "Hakia Gallery". The Gallery is a partially human-edited results for over several thousand results. The immediate reaction I had was "Is Mahalo a Hakia clone?" – do a search for cancer on both Hakia and Mahalo to see an example. Mahalo probably wins a point on design but gives up multiple points as the Hakia Gallery uses some human and some computer to create a much more robust page. So is Mahalo a clone? We already know that Jason knows how to clone… see Netscape.

Update: Based on my offline emails with Jason regarding this section, here is my clarification. I am in no way suggesting that Mahalo lifted any design elements from Hakia. I am merely noting that the pages are similar. I think Mahalo’s design is easier on the eyes and Hakia’s technology appears better by combining human-edited results plus their search technology. Also, please note that the link to Netscape being a Digg clone goes to TechCrunch.

Mahalo’s social media usage

One of the ways Mahalo is getting traffic is by leveraging their employees and contractors to submit and vote up stories on the social media sites. Here is an example post on the news group:

When I first came across this, I was completely outraged. How could a CEO ask his or her employees to digg, reddit, stumble, scape a story to get it on the front page. It’s one thing to ask some buddies to help out with a digg, but for a corporation to ask their employees to do this, just seemed wrong, very wrong.

I decided to hold off posting about this as I wanted to really think about it. And here is the conclusion I came to. It’s ok in moderation. I guess there is no difference to this type of cheerleading as if Ford asked their employees to pass out Ford info as they walk in a park. Jason isn’t forcing the employees to vote, nor is he asking for positive votes. As Mahalo grows in number of employees/contractors, we will see more Mahalo stories hit the front page. I do wonder, if the social sites were all "corporate run" would the largest corporations always make the front page of x site?

Investigating Mahalo’s Alexa ranking

Jason has touted his Alexa ranking (for whatever its worth, which is basically nil) all over the Internet, mostly at Valleywag. And currently Mahalo sits at a rank of 5,267 for the 3-month average and an awesome 3,256 for last week. I decided to put on my Columbo analytics hat and have a look deeper (ok, only as deep as Alexa goes!). Here is the chart of number of pageviews and what parts of the Mahalo site are generating the traffic:

Ten pageviews per visitor – who wouldn’t love that! And then we see where the traffic is coming from. Almost half of the traffic is to internal, non-public sections of Mahalo. Greenhouse is the section of the site where the "guides" work on creating the pages that appear on Mahalo. And this means that at least a portion of the guides are using the Alexa toolbar. When you enter the Greenhouse, you search for the terms that you might want to write a results-page for. But it might take you 20 searches to find a page that isn’t created already. Hence the 9.8 pageviews per visitor!

Now back to that 5,267 ranking. Since we know that ~50% of the traffic is to internal sections and we know that the majority of views are from guides, we can apply this to the other ~50 of the traffic that is going to the main Mahalo.com site. In essence, the majority of the traffic to Mahalo is actually internal, employee traffic! I wonder what their ranking would be if this was removed. My HP10B++ estimates it to be in the 60-80k range.

Jason is smart, very smart. Get your employees to use a publicly available tool and over time, as you increase employees, you increase monetizable page views. Even if it’s not on his radar today, it should be. Imagine if you had 1 million page views, and your employees added another 3 million creating pages to support the other 1 million. To the average Internet marketer (i.e. most of the ones I have dealt with), that’s 4 million page views to buy/sell! Genius!

Employee Encouragement

The last part of this conversation is around employee encouragement and feedback. Jason has done a great job here. Since Jason is so public online, it’s easy to tell when he is having a bad day. I have watched him throw a fit on x person or y site and just a few minutes later congratulate the guides on Mahalo. It’s so critical to give your employees the encouragement they need to be satisfied. Writing search pages is probably about as boring (most times) as watching paint dry.

But if you can get people excited about the work they are doing, they will feel better about it. I hope this post encourages Jason to talk about employee encouragement in the Web worker field. I have managed teams for years now and it’s easy to walk over to someone’s desk and tell them how great a job they did. But online where your workers are spread out, it’s not as easy. Might be a great niche there for someone to blog about!

When I step into a fight I make sure that I have the needed ammunition to win. If you use a gun in battle, make sure it has bullets. If you fight online, make sure you have the right tools to win.

Yesterday Owen Thomas at Valleywag used Alexa to point out how poorly Mahalo is doing. As most of you know I am not a fan of Mahalo. But using Alexa to try to make Mahalo appear a joke is plain stupid. All it does is draw more attention to Mahalo. There are plenty of other ways to pick on Mahalo. :)

What the chart that Owen embedded shows is the topic I discussed last week that the initial "celebuzz" can only take one only so far. Now it's up to the product and Jason to get the buzz to continue and to grow.

The issue with using Alexa to do battle with is a topic we have discussed numerous times on CN. There is so much more that is wrong with Alexa than is right. While Alexa can sometimes be used as a rough guide for tech only sites, I would never use it in a battle.

Services such as Hitwise and Comscore are also flawed but much typically provide more accurate results than Alexa. Quantcast will also be a player as more sites signup to be "Quantified." I can only guess that sometime in the near future Google Analytics will offer a way to share your metrics. Once this happens we may see an Alexa replacement that "may" serve some value.

About two months ago, Cn became a "quantified publisher" when I placed the Quantcast code on the site. Checking the stats today, it notes that the site's rank is: 32,917 right between two porn sites (WTF!). Interesting.

Anyway, after checking Quantcast's ranking for Cn, I popped over to the highly buzzed-about site Compete. Surely they will be pretty close right? Nope. Compete shows a rank of 202,430 with 6,000 visitors in April 2007. Blech. I also note that Compete now links over to AboutUs.org for more information. Double Blech.

And last but certainly not least, let's check Alexa. Certainly a company with a slogan of, "The Web Information Company" must have it right. They show Cn with a current rank of 26,970.

I know this is a simple comparison but it shows that these Web reporting applications are clearly not 100% correct and I still say the same thing I have said since the late '90s. Which is that I don't trust them for making deals. Alexa and Quantcast appear to be close but does that mean they are right? Compete seems the furthest off, especially with their monthly user count which is absolutely not correct.

Why do these inaccuracies affect Cn in the wallet? Because potential advertisers might check these sites and see that Cn has lower traffic numbers than I quote to them. Will we ever see lawsuits by companies who are affected by poor ranking and public analytics apps? I am guessing, yes.

Check our previous coverage of Quantcast, Compete and Alexa.