
Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race - InfinityX0
http://searchengineland.com/mahalo-calacanis-time-to-end-the-content-farm-arms-race-64109
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patio11
_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 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.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
VIDEO is our answer.

We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard:

1\. video 2\. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3\. quality Q&A (with
some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote)

best jason

~~~
a5seo
ExpertVillage, developed the content farm video strategy, like 6 years ago...
Almost exactly as you describe.

Guess who founded that: Byron Reese the brains behind Demand Media's entire
content algo system. <http://www.demandmedia.com/executive-leadership/byron-
reese/>

So unfortunately, this isn't some new idea Demand missed... it's one they've
moved beyond.

~~~
gojomo
AOL's recently leaked 'AOL Way' playbook for content-farming also targets
"70%" of all created pages having video.

------
ericd
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.

~~~
wisty
Sociopathic? Not necessarily. He's just being pragmatic. A sociopath is
somebody who lie when he is expected to tell the truth. There's no real world
for somebody who does the opposite (tells the truth even if he would be
expected to lie), but most people are just pragmatic - they tell the truth to
their friends and co-workers, and lie if they happen to be a CEO putting out a
press release.

~~~
ericd
No, CEOs are not expected to lie - that's very bad business, generally. They
can selectively focus on aspects of the business that make them look good, and
dodge questions they don't want to answer, but flat out lying as a CEO is
wrong, and destroys your company's and your credibility.

------
juddlyon
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.

~~~
neworbit
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.

~~~
ojbyrne
It seems likely that "get lots of press" is dependent on "polarizing."

Personally I'd vote for Calacanis having more substance then Ferris.

~~~
davidw
"The 4 hour content farm", coming soon!

~~~
neworbit
Heck, that's no stretch at all, 4HWW was all about outsourcing your research
and production. Saying "now apply that to web page generation" is a one
sentence book.

------
ohashi
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?

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
We never made spam, we always used humans, but we made pages that were "light"
in my opinion. They also lacked an EXPERT.

We solved this by hiring 55 video editors in the last six months and we now
add an expert to every page.

So, if you definition of a content farm was "light" content written by non-
experts then we we're a content farm.

Guilty as charged, but I confessed my sins and I'm now on the side of the
righteous! Aaron Wall is now my biggest fan... he tells his clients to model
their sits around my sites.

~~~
ohashi
Jason, I respect you, you've accomplished a lot and I can only hope to achieve
as much success.

That being said, come on. You confessed and it's out of some altruistic
epiphany?

Mahalo isn't competing for mindshare, it's competing for SEO share and you got
beat. If you are switching to a high quality content producer, let the quality
of your content speak for itself. Compete for consumer's mindshare as a
destination for quality content. You've picked some battles I still respect
like fighting against angels charging to be pitched. However, you don't have
the same moral high ground on this one. You have no legitimacy as a crusader
against content farms. Period. Stop it.

Create some awesome content and share it with us. Sites like this THRIVE on
the high quality content. Or re-work your business model and SEO and compete
again for that long tail xylophone playing monkies. Either way, stop treating
us like idiots and be honest with us.

------
neworbit
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.

~~~
aothman
"Your time to break even is quite a while on a per-article basis" - and that's
the crux of the matter entirely.

As per this WSJ article [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-
demand-medi...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/08/12/where-did-demand-
medias-profits-go/)

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.

------
moe
All I can say is that I haven't had a mahalo page pollute my search results
for months. Keep up the good work google!

~~~
a5seo
Add pws=0 to your queries. You probably have stopped seeing them, but it's
based on your click behavior.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra
page!" nonsense is really going to work.

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.

More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin
of web content.

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.

Instead of focusing on the _beginning_ of this arms race, the filling in of
trivial content, we should be focusing on the _end_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Google is not fair today--that's the problem!

ehow is an 11 year old domain name and they create millions of pages. They
will out rank anyone due to:

a) domain age b) flooding the index with dozens of pages around a niche topic
(as opposed to one good one).

google does NOT rank for quality... it ranks for signs of quality such as
domain age, inbound links, etc.

until google can tell that there 100+ spam articles on a niche topic are not
as good as on lifehacker or Mahalo or /. page we're screwed.

I mean, in order to win you need to buy and old domain and flood the index.
what if everyone does this?!?!

~~~
tptacek
This eHow page was written by a human being and convincingly answers a
(trivial) question:

<http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html>

This Mahalo page was written by a sloppy computer program and is a shotgun
blast of random gronk schlorped on a page in the hopes of making it appear to
answer a question that nobody, even at Mahalo, really thought about:

<http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/>

If Google is bonusing up the owner of the former page to the detriment of the
owner of the latter page, they're doing the Internet a favor. My only knock on
them is that their response to the latter page didn't involve blowtorches.

~~~
jshen
Jason is right, your oddly skewed example isn't a counter to jason's point.
Google doesn't rank based on quality, but a proxy that is gamable and is
heavily gamed. I'm skeptical that they can ever effectively solve this
problem.

------
Tycho
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.

In fact, maybe that's what they wanted all those donations for...

~~~
mikecarlucci
I can see it now... "A business announcement from Wikipedia founder Jimmy
Wales: We have acquired Wookiepedia."

~~~
_delirium
He does actually own Wookiepedia, but in his private capacity as a businessman
(occasionally the source of some conflict-of-interest controversy):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia>

------
dschobel
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.

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".

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.

------
FiddlerClamp
"Help, I was trying to salt the soup and it got oversalted! The best solution
is to ask everyone else to stop salting it, too!"

~~~
j_baker
Well... Yes. If the soup is shared by two billion people, and a few of them
are dropping tens of thousands of tons of salt a day, I think one can be
forgiven for asking them to quit. Nor do I see anything wrong with one of them
realizing what they're doing, stopping, and asking other people to stop too.

~~~
FiddlerClamp
Right around the time when Google has stated it's going to clamp down on it,
too!

~~~
j_baker
So? What's your point? I mean, Calcanis was clear that he felt that this was
the best business decision. Does the fact that he's doing it to make more
money make it any less a good thing?

------
jasonmcalacanis
Boy am I in trouble over this one. :-)

~~~
aphyr
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 ads, "help me."

I'll give you a good slow clap.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Thanks pal.

Frankly, I think we got caught up in the races with content farms like Demand
Media too much. You can't create thousands of articles a day and expect
quality--it's impossible!!!

So, we move to dozens to maybe 200 pages a day... but we do it with quality
and hope for the best.

The good news is we broken even last year and have a ton of money in the bank.
We are going to ramp up our burn and try to make a LOT of high-quality videos.

You can see them here: <http://www.youtube.com/mahalocallofduty>
<http://www.youtube.com/mahalopiano> <http://www.youtube.com/mahalodotcom>
<http://www.youtube.com/mahalomath> <http://www.youtube.com/mahalocooking>

These videos are getting better and better... I'd say most are 6-9 out of 10.
Every month we should add a half point to our average. That means by the
summer we should only publish stuff that's an "eight or better."

We are going to build a wide, commercial version of the Kahn Academy.

~~~
aphyr
_We are going to build a wide, commercial version of the Kahn Academy._

This is a terrific idea, and I wish you all the best in doing it well. You've
got the drive, money, and PR skill to make it a reality. Go for it.

------
kyberneticka
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.

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.

------
robryan
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.

------
swordfish
And it comes with a soundtrack: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntgYJ9iz47c>

~~~
neworbit
Well, let's be fair - "I can change" is the only reasonable response - the
alternative is that Google gives them the death penalty.

------
j_baker
I suppose the first step _is_ admitting you have a problem. This could just be
rhetoric, but I certainly hope it isn't.

