

Jason Calacanis: A message to the Mahalo community - chris24
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/important-and-exciting-announcement-from-jason-for-mahalo-contributors

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ghurlman
"Mahalo dollars"? What's the conversion rate to USD, or to Shrute Bucks for
that matter?

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what
1 Mahalo Dollar ~= 0.68 USD, based on the price of iPod nano in their store.

Or 1 Mahalo Dollar ~= 0.57 USD, based on their $25 gift cards.

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jasonmcalacanis
I'm sorry, why is this on Hacker News exactly?

Isn't there a more interesting story about another deserving startup or
individual we can focus on?

really.... I'm bored with seeing Calacanis on the front page of HN.

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lanstein
There's a Mahalo 'community'?

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jasonmcalacanis
Actually, there is a really solid community of folks building pages, asking
questions, providing answers, etc.

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what
I'm inclined to believe this. Check out this question titled "Do your family
members or friends criticize you for the amount of time you spend on Mahalo?"

[http://www.mahalo.com/answers/do-your-family-members-or-
frie...](http://www.mahalo.com/answers/do-your-family-members-or-friends-
criticize-you-for-the-amount-of-time-you-spend-on-mahalo-need-advice)

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epoxy
Well that's certainly confusing.

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oldgregg
I agree, he keeps using "community" and "mahalo" in the same sentence.

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alanh
How long has Mahalo been using Dora the Explorer as their mascot?

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what
How can they afford to pay 50+ people $1000/month. Do they really pull in that
much from advertising?

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slouch
www.mahalo.com/type-anything-here

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blizkreeg
I get that they're making good money by embedding ads in every inch of the
site. Is this really a 'good' and respectable business model though? Something
about it doesn't sit well with me, especially when the site doesn't offer
quality content to the user.

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OmarIsmail
Things aren't always so cut and dry. There's probably some people - a large
number in fact - that does derive benefit from some of Mahalo's pages. You
also have the fact that the revenue generated by Mahalo is going towards
paying people which lets them live and feed themselves, etc.

In terms of the grand scheme of things, what Mahalo is doing isn't that "bad".

It's also not the ideal case either. As a savvy web user a Mahalo page is one
of the last pages I'd want to visit, but I'm also savvy enough to know how to
avoid it.

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jasonmcalacanis
Suggest taking a look at these pages, which get a lot of traffic, that people
stay on for a long time and that provide a lot of value:

<http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords> <http://www.mahalo.com/how-
to-make-strawberry-shortcake> [http://www.mahalo.com/star-wars-the-force-
unleashed-walkthro...](http://www.mahalo.com/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-
walkthrough)

~~~
OmarIsmail
I don't doubt that there are diamonds in the rough. However, when I search and
see a random Mahalo page in Google I have no way to know if this is one of the
diamonds, or one of the thousands of "rough". Why take that chance when I can
go to a more reliable site that I trust more?

