<i>You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10</i><p>I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale.<p>Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something like $68 goes to Demand Media.) The content is less than compelling, but a) it is clearly, absurdly profitable for me as an advertiser and b) it is economical for DM to produce.<p>Example:<p><a href="http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html</a><p>This is a fairly typical eHow page. At ~300 words, it cost on the order of $6~8 to write. In <i>January alone</i>, it generated about $1.30 in DM's cut of my $2 AdWords spend. It will do four times that or more in February. Count the other advertisers on the page and I would be <i>astonished</i> if it pulls in less than $20 ~ $25 of revenue this year. This model empirically scales to the freaking moon.<p>I also checked my stats for how much I'm subsidizing Mahalo. Turns out: not that much! ($20 in four years.) The reason appears to be that, at least as it relates to educational bingo cards, DM convincingly clobbers Mahalo on execution.<p><a href="http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/</a> <-- <i>Winces.</i> 30 words of content and half of them are an inducement to click on ads!<p>Yeah, if I were Mahalo, I wouldn't want to compete against DM using DM's model either. They're just better at farming. I am skeptical that the new model will work except as PR cover for the old model: i.e. handcrafted pillar content provides enough plausible deniability to hope Google does not mass purge all thin mahalo.com/* pages from the Internet. The economics of $1,000+ a page pillar content makes sense if (and probably only if) the pillar content preserves thousands of cheaper pages.<p>So much the better for Mahalo if they can simultaneously get an effective competitor of those filler pages torched.
I am stunned. Calacanis was just brazenly lying about his belief in the quality of his articles and that it was just a few isolated articles that were thin. Now he claims he couldn't sleep as well at night before due to Mahalo's mounds of crap content. And apparently he's completely unrepentant about having to lie on behalf of his company, now taking a holier than thou stance against his competitors. Unbelievable. This is borderline sociopathic.
I can't help but enjoy watching this guy operate. He's an odd combo of smart, aggressive, shameless, and transparent.<p>Seems to me he realized eHow is an unstoppable SEO machine and decided to positior, err, "pivot" against them.<p>He really belongs in politics, not tech.
I just don't buy it. Aaron Wall called you out a while ago and if I recall correctly you denied and denied. This sudden change of heart doesn't read like a moral turn-around, it reads like surrender. You got out-competed by Demand, AOL, Associated Content and trying to re-frame the argument as 'we're all going to suffer if you don't cut back' is bullshit. If you really were turning around Mahalo and it wasn't going to be a content farm (whatever your definition of the term), all of this wouldn't matter. So arguing that everyone has to cut back would be silly, you should let them content farm and get banned by big bad google and you can take home all the prizes! But that's not what is really happening is it?
I think Mahalo has refocused appropriately, and I am pleasantly surprised to see that. But I think this is no longer a sustainable business model.<p>If you need to spend as much on content generation as I'm seeing cited here, your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis.
I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra page!" nonsense is really going to work.<p>The problem here is that folks want to know stuff that has very little -- but measurable -- value in terms of advertising dollars. You are not going to make Champagne pages for folks with beer budgets. Doesn't make sense.<p>More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin of web content.<p>So gee. I don't know, maybe Google should worry about making itself look better? If that means de-listing E-how, then so be it.<p>Instead of focusing on the <i>beginning</i> of this arms race, the filling in of trivial content, we should be focusing on the <i>end</i> of the race: a net full of cool, informative, and deep articles about just about every subject imaginable. That's a noble goal -- but in my opinion you have to crawl before you can walk. Shutting these guys down isn't going to do much except stifle innovation.<p>All content generators -- bloggers, e-mags, content farms, micro-sites and the rest of them -- need from Google is a fair, level playing field. One rule for everybody. After that is accomplished, then I would expect people who make content would start making crappy content, Google would raise the bar, and this back-and-forth will continue for a while.<p>Sounds all pretty normal to me. For every page that ranks highly that ticks somebody off, somewhere out there, some kid has a hamster who is just tickled pink there is a set of instructions on how to wash it.<p>I think the real thing that's going on here is that lots of money is getting involved so the players are starting to posture, both to the investors, the search engines, and the competition. Wonder what they imagine their various end-games are. Love to be a fly on the wall in some of those board meetings.
I think wikipedia could kill this whole circus if they started a 'casualpedia' spinoff/superset that allowed people to contribute content beyond strictly encyclopaedic articles - and still without the advertising.<p>In fact, maybe that's what they wanted all those donations for...
And then one day someone will come along who pays his farmers $2000 per page and claim that Mahalo is polluting the web with their lousy $1000pp content.<p>The issue boils down to the fact that the search landscape is fundamentally a representative democracy. Google has a huge amount of power but if people become dissatisfied with the results, Google will be out the door quicker than you can say "altavista".<p>And here is Jason's problem: if people clicking the Google search results are satisfied with ehow, then ehow they shall get. Urging people to demand better content is a fool's errand.
Google has basically solved the question of how to determine what is most "relevant" based on inbound and outbound links, etc. What Google (or Bing, or any other competitor) has to figure out now is how to source the best "authority" per search. This is almost the holy grail of search - find me the best, most relevant item to the arbitrary, nebulous concept I'm poorly phrasing. There are a ton of amateurish suggestions I could make, but I'm not in any position or power to suggest anything.<p>I do think that given what the article points out, Aol's purchase of the HuffPo seems more ill-advised. If Google is able to determine that the large majority of the content on HuffPo is rehash of another site, kiss that investment goodbye. I've always been on a mission to get as close to the source of things as I can. I'm all for relevant analysis, but summarizing an article word for word is tough to accept.
I don't really think you can complain about the top search being lower quality when up until recently complete junk from Mahalo was doing the same thing.
I think the demand media model will be more profitable than this one unless Mahalo is betting on a collection of quality articles to help support a collection of average articles. I am a fan of the nicer layout they have now, just don't see how an article with video for the long tail of search terms that cost hundreds to make will ever be profitable.