Mahalo Tweaks Its Business Model
By Anna Johnson on June 7th, 2009AllThingsDigital’s MediaMemo author Peter Kafka reports that Mahalo is set to become a ‘paying Wikipedia’. Mahalo, the ‘human powered search engine’ founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, will soon let Mahalo users create results pages for its searches.
Essentially, while Mahalo has traditionally employed staff to create its search engine results pages, the company’s business is shifting towards a model where users can not only ‘own’ a results page, but also split any advertising revenue that page generates via Google Adsense with Mahalo. Users will get ‘Mahalo bucks’ (75 cents) and, as such, will get 37.5 percent of the Adsense revenue per page.
What’s interesting about Mahalo’s move is Jason Calacanis’ vision for the company. As reported by Peter Kafka, Jason envisages the company evolving from employing a 50-person strong staff to possibly having half that many editors overseeing hundreds of workers. Apparently, Jason foresees the creation of results pages to be a part-time or even full-time job for some people.
Although some of Mahalo’s pages currently earn up to $10,000 per day in ad revenue, others will earn much less. Whether or not it turns out to be a legitimate earner for people, the idea of paying lots of users for content is, if not new, intriguing. If successful… I wonder how many other online companies will follow suit?
