Jason Calacanis Rolls Out the New Mahalo: Yahoo Answers-Killer
by Peter Kafka
Posted on December 15, 2008 at 1:00 AM PT
In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.”
Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.
Like Yahoo Answers, Mahalo’s new product relies on users to answer other users’ questions. Unlike Yahoo’s (YHOO) site, Calacanis promises to give his most prolific answer-givers a chance to make money, via a virtual currency they can earn by answering questions.
The proposition: Users can ask questions for free. But they can also buy “Mahalo Dollars” using real money and reward people who answer their queries. Users can eventually cash out the Mahalo currency they earn for real dollars, with Calacanis taking a 25 percent cut.
This aligns him with a growing number of Internet execs who think they can make money via virtual goods and currencies. That’s worked well for Asian companies and a handful of Western videogames, like Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft. But the market for virtual stuff has yet to appear at most U.S.-based Web sites.
Still, Calacanis thinks he’s got a better shot of making it work next year than his original plan for 2009: Selling ads on his site besides the ones he runs from Google’s (GOOG) AdSense. “I think it’s going to be very hard to make money selling ads,” he said. “The market needs this more than it needs us out there trying to sell inventory.”
All of this supposes that people are actually willing to pay for advice they get over the Internet. I’m dubious, but then again I had no idea Yahoo Answers was as successful as it was until Calacanis walked me through the user stats in his demo*: 24 million unique users in the U.S., according to Quantcast.
I did try it out myself, and found that Calacanis’s beta users (who are presumably incented to answer as many questions as they can) did a decent job of answering my query about moving my Palm data to my BlackBerry via my MacBook–and much better than the people at Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, who didn’t even try.
But it’s still not good enough. Looks like if I want to get this done I’m going to have to pay someone real cash.
*A note for anyone who ever has to demo a product: Find some way to watch Calacanis go through his paces live if you can. You can get a sense of the experience by reading his tutorial, or by watching video of him in action. But it’s another thing to get it in real time, and watch him simultaneously hype and soft-sell. Really effective stuff.
[Image Credit: Joi Ito]
Comments
You should check out WikiAnswers.com, a wiki based Q&A website. According to Quantcast, WikiAnswers has 26 million users in the US and 41 million worldwide.
Posted by Bruce Smith at December 15th, 2008 at 4:02 amI did, Bruce — see above. Still waiting for someone there to try answering my query: http://bit.ly/rRvk
Posted by Peter Kafka at December 15th, 2008 at 4:41 amLooks like there is a good response now.
Posted by Bruce Smith at December 15th, 2008 at 7:27 amPeople have questions. As evidence of this, my college-graduate roommates type questions into Google, hoping some oracle will come back with a sagacious response. What does come back is some (mis?)information from Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers, the latter of which is invariably composed (and misspelled) by a teenager.
While I’m intrigued by Mahalo’s new project, I wonder if there is truly any value in turning the Web into a call center.
What sites like these do is devalue the research skills we all learned in college (like math, the things we learned in the library were intended to have real-world value!) You are right to be skeptical of whether people will pay money for this service. It’s one thing to pay a doctor money, or pay to play World of Warcraft. It’s quite another to pay a stranger over the Internet, even if their advice is sound.
But people want answers quickly, and these sites are apparently the only (Web-based) way to get them. It’s awfully hard now to convince people that doing their own (question-mark-free) research, involving poring over pages of search results using a variety of search engines, would yield better results.
Posted by Liz Colville at December 15th, 2008 at 9:40 amRemember, Yahoo wields a traffic hose with 400 – 500 MM users. Besides, keyword combinations have long since approximated questions, and Google searches thousands of forums and message boards. So, where is the value?
Posted by Jonathan Marcus at December 15th, 2008 at 10:14 amFirst thing I knew of like this was askearth.com, although the similarly named ask.com also has “experts” answering questions.
Seems to be plenty of existing ways to accomplish this. Not clear there is a market (not a big one anyway) for yet another one.
Posted by Mac Beach at December 15th, 2008 at 12:22 pmnon starter
Posted by Sam Harrison at December 15th, 2008 at 12:48 pm