Mahalo 2.0 Is Proving a Success

Mahalo is part search engine part wiki, providing human-created results to common searches. In order to spur further growth the site added monetary rewards for its editors and now Business Insider got a hold of the site's creator, Jason Calcanis, a well-known figure in the industry, to provide an update on how the site is doing. And it looks like the latest venture was a popular one for the site as its traffic has seen sustained growth in the past months.

The site has been trying to enter the search engine market offering a very different approach to the main players in the segment. While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft along with a myriad of smaller search engines rely on computer algorithms to provide the results and the rankings, Mahalo opted for a “low-tech” approach using humans to create the result pages for the more popular queries. These volunteer editors can apply to be the maintainers of a particular query, with the task of populating the results and keeping them updated falling solely to them.

While this approach proved to be somewhat popular it was reaching its maximum potential and the rate at which new pages were added wasn't growing fast enough. At the time the site had in the region of 100,000 result pages populated but that number would have to reach several millions if it wanted to be competitive. To achieve this a new initiative was set up, allowing editors to get a share of the advertising revenue on the pages they maintained.

Two months after the new version of the site was launched the results are visible. Traffic has nearly doubled, coming from around 4.2 million in May to over 6 million in June, 8 million in July and set to be more than 9 million in August, according to directly measured data from Quantcast. The site is also on track to make over $1 million from AdSense and the top editors are on their way to making thousands of dollars per year.

At this point the future is looking particularly good for the site, with Calcanis estimating that there will be 100 editors making $10,000 in four months. This of course goes well for Mahalo, which makes $1.25 for every $1 it pays its editors and the site hopes to enter the top 100 web sites within a year.