Jason Calacanis Tries Turning Mahalo Into a Wikipedia That Pays
by Peter Kafka
Posted on June 2, 2009 at 4:59 PM PT
Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo is getting a two-part makeover.
There’s a visual overhaul for the search engine, which involves cramming a lot more stuff on each results page. This is becoming standard operating practice on the Web, both because it offers readers a lot more stuff, and because it seems to help improve search engine rankings. (You can see the before and after pages at the bottom of this post.)
The other change isn’t as easy to see, but it’s a big change for Calacanis, who originally envisioned his company as “human-powered search engine,” where his employees would build out results pages one at a time.
But now he’s hoping to get Mahalo users to do the work, Wikipedia-style, with a twist–he’ll pay them.
The pitch: Calacanis will offer users the chance to “own” a results page, and split any advertising revenue the page generates, primarily via Google (GOOG) AdSense. He’ll be paying users with “Mahalo bucks,” which cash out at 75 cents on the dollar, so users are really keeping 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates.
Calacanis says some of his pages are generating up to $10,000 a year, but most will make far less. Will that be enough to encourage people to build and maintain Web pages on a piecework basis?
He is betting it will: Right now Calacanis employs about 50 people to make his results pages, but he says that over time, that number will shrink to a couple dozen editors who will oversee “hundreds” of workers: “We think this will become a half-time to full-time job for a large number of out-of-work people.”
Calacanis says the move isn’t designed to save him money, since he’ll be carving out a chunk of his ad revenue to pay his people. He’s raised $20 million and says that will last him four to five years, thanks in part to cuts he made last fall; he predicts he’ll be breaking even within a year.
Here are the before and after screenshots:
Mahalo 1.0
Mahalo 2.0
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Comments
This has been tried by Squidoo. It’s also similar to knol.
Posted by Bjorn Tipling at June 2nd, 2009 at 7:39 pmBah. Another act of desperation on the behalf of Mahalo/Calacanis.
Look how just few days ago, Calacanis was caught misapropriating other site’s content: blog.fluther.com/blog/2009/06/01/an-open-letter-to-jason-calacanis/
This will be just another content theft site but on a large scale.
And it will FAIL!
Posted by Dave Esmo at June 2nd, 2009 at 10:05 pmPeter: “Calacanis says some of his pages are generating up to $10,000 a year, but most will make far less. Will that be enough to encourage people to build and maintain Web pages on a piecework basis?” You should dig into what the actual distribution of keyword query frequency is. My hunch, if the major search engines are any indication, is that disproportionately few keywords drive the vast majority of traffic (by a longshot). Which would probably translate into a similarly distributed frequency of visits to member-owned search pages. On one hand, this validates the potential of a human-powered search engine, in that there’s a lot of traffic goes to finite number of pages. But it also questions the real money-making potential for users. And “users are really keeping 37.5 percent of each dollar their page generates”? But how much is Google Adsense keeping from the original split? I’m not knocking Mahalo, and perhaps this model will succeed. But these were my initial questions.
Posted by Max Kalehoff at June 3rd, 2009 at 3:38 amInteresting. I like Jason and all, but it’s disappointing that he’s giving dedicated maintenance workers only 50% of their “claimed” page’s ad revenues. Revenue sharing for content has been done before (Squidoo, Helium come to mind), but they always take a hefty cut of the action away from the creator.
Over on MyWikiBiz, for over two years, the volunteer editors can claim a page about any legal entity, maintain it, and keep 100% of the ad revenues within their content.
MyWikiBiz draws only from the ad revenue generated by the thin footer of text-link ads at the bottom of every page. The top editors are pulling down about $30-$50 per month from ads.
Posted by Gregory Kohs at June 3rd, 2009 at 9:40 amThe original premise & promise of Mahalo was that it would employ human judgment to clear away all the garbage in search engine results and give you only the top quality results you need. Now it jams as much info into a page as possible so that it SEOs well, and pays writers and editors a pittance, motivating them to create quick shoddy work. I understand the economics, but will any intelligent user really want to use this product ? There is a large role in the Internet’s future for well-curated content that clears away all the clutter and directs users only to credible and comprehensive resources; it looks like Mahalo has veered off that road.
Posted by mark moran at June 3rd, 2009 at 9:58 amUm…wasn’t this the About.com model?
Posted by joshua palau at June 4th, 2009 at 3:40 am