Agreed. In everything I have read about him it seems perfectly clear that he's happy to game search engine ranking algorithms to place highly in their results. Moreover, driving volume to his site(s) in this way is his main concern.
But unfortunately for the people coming to his sites there really isn't all that much content to see. Perhaps this has changed recently - if so, I'd love to see an example (just one!) of a page on Mahalo which gives better information than Wikipedia (for example)...
I don't doubt that Mahalo has some detailed pages. However I think these are the exception rather than the norm (and almost certainly created to benefit from particular keyword trends).
Note that there appear to have always been "high-content" pages at Mahalo; the complaint was, in addition to the small % of high-content pages, there were also vast numbers of long-tail pages with virtually no content.
We are making 900 high-quality videos a week. 105 people at Mahalo now, and we will add 100 more this year. We should be able to hit 3k videos a week this year.
The next wave of videos we create you guys will actually be using.... so I'm looking forward to hearing what people think of our lynda.com-like stuff. :-)
Do you ever think that maybe Mahalo isn't working out and perhaps it is time to give it another go with a different product? It's good to evolve but at some point, throw in the towel. I'd say the same for Seesmic. It's admirable, but at some point after many reinventions, you've just got to step back and examine honestly if you're wasting talent and time on a losing ticket. There's very little about Mahalo that makes it attractive other than the great design. When does anyone say to themselves "Hrm I bet Mahalo has this information" or "I should check Mahalo.com." However if you do plan to stick it out until you're bankrupt you might want to think about employing librarians. Helping resolving information needs is what they are best at.
Well, did you watch my talk about pivoting from DLD? In that talk I outline how Mahalo's human-powered search vision got us to the top 400 sites, but that it wasn't growing and the users wanted more how to/instructional content.
We iterated, and mahalo is a top 200 site that also gets 1M+ views a day on YouTube. yes, 365M views of our 23k videos every year.
I do think your question "i should check Mahalo" is an EXCELLENT one. Human-powered search doesn't have that draw, but I think free instructional videos will.
If you wanted to speak Russian or make perfect grilled cheese or solve a video game you would do well to come to Mahalo.com.
Direct traffic is the real test of a sites worth... and we're very focused on growing that with high-quality instruction.
We have tons of money and tons of revenue... we can't go bankrupt if we can easily make a profit can we? :-)
Talk to me in one year and we'll be in the top 100 sites and have 100M+ views a month on YouTube. :-)
1. The quality on Google is really low. People use open microphones, no lighting and there is no real focus on content, curriculum or the credentials of the person speaking. That's what we bring to the table I hope: a great teacher, with a great lesson plan and high-end production (hd, audio, etc).
2. SEO lifts from Video include time spent on page, inbound links and overall value.
