11–20 of 65 posts
I can't help but enjoy watching this guy operate. He's an odd combo of smart, aggressive, shameless, and transparent. Seems to me he realized eHow is an unstoppable SEO machine and decided to positior, err, "pivot" against them. He really belongs in politics, not tech.
Boy am I in trouble over this one. :-)
Honestly, Jason, this is the only time I've found myself agreeing with you. Mahalo was a low SNR, spam-driven, visually abhorrent, search-result-polluting pile of useless self-referential scraped-off-wikipedia bullshit that I wanted to burn to the ground so badly that I wrote code to excise it from search results before its inchoate content managed to scream dimly from somewhere below two folds worth of weight loss a…
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. 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.
As per this WSJ article http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-demand-medi...
if demand media is allowed to amortize out their costs over years (under the assumption every piece of "How to bathe your gerbil" will keep bringing in revenue for the next half-decade) they become strikingly profitable, especially for a company that writes words on the Internet. If not, they're hemorrhaging cash.
Given Google's recently renewed focus on providing quality search results, I'd take the under on all of these companies, mahalo included.
I can't help but enjoy watching this guy operate. He's an odd combo of smart, aggressive, shameless, and transparent. Seems to me he realized eHow is an unstoppable SEO machine and decided to positior, err, "pivot" against them. He really belongs in politics, not tech.
Jason Calacanis and Tim Ferris are the two most polarizing dudes here on HN as far as I can tell. But love 'em or hate 'em, they do both get lots of press.
Personally I'd vote for Calacanis having more substance then Ferris.
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.
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.
Example:
http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html
This is a fairly typical eHow page. At ~300 words, it cost on the order of $6~8 to write. In January alone, 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 astonished if it pulls in less than $20 ~ $25 of revenue this year. This model empirically scales to the freaking moon.
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.
http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/ Winces. 30 words of content and half of them are an inducement to click on ads!
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.
So much the better for Mahalo if they can simultaneously get an effective competitor of those filler pages torched.
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 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. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…
Boy am I in trouble over this one. :-)
Honestly, Jason, this is the only time I've found myself agreeing with you. Mahalo was a low SNR, spam-driven, visually abhorrent, search-result-polluting pile of useless self-referential scraped-off-wikipedia bullshit that I wanted to burn to the ground so badly that I wrote code to excise it from search results before its inchoate content managed to scream dimly from somewhere below two folds worth of weight loss a…
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.