Jason Calacanis has a new videoblog called Mahalo Daily. The show is starring Veronica Belmont. [I’m a big fan of Veronica (Hi Veronica!)] Unfortunately, I think Veronica will not be able to get much support for the show by working for Mahalo. Setting aside the possibility that Calacanis may turn off viewers to the videoblog due to his aggressive marketing tactics, the kinds of problems that the show will face will likely be problems concerning the promotion of the Mahalo website as opposed to the problems of videobloging. This is not bad, videoblogging as advertising is okay. However, because the goals are marketing based, the problems and answers will most likely be marketing based as well.
For instance, instead of asking, “How can we make the show better?”, Jason asks for advise on “how to get to 100-250k views in a day (quickly)?”
The real problem, in this case however, is not the videoblog itself. No matter how great the videoblog may become and no matter how much traffic it could one day drive to Mahalo, the problem is still that Mahalo is not a worthwhile product. You can advertise all you want but if the product is not good, it wont help.
Can anyone find a single positive review of Mahalo? I have never seen a single positive review of the site.
Mahalo is fundamentally flawed because it’s purpose is to provide useful, valuable information about a specific subject matter, but ultimately so that users who are looking for that information will be lead astray by clicking on less relevant advertising.
Mahalo is unlike Google which uses advertising to help pay for the technology of generating great search returns and unlike Wikipedia which has the purpose of providing democratic search results.
No, the mission of Mahalo was not born out of an idea to help improve the lives of others. It’s simply to make money for Jason at the expense of people who don’t know better and click on the ads. This is not just what it has turned into as a result, this is the purpose of the site’s existence.
Everytime a user clicks on an ad, they are being taken to information that is promotionally paid for as opposed to being there because it is the most valuable. And when that happens, the website is a success.
I consider this kind of activity to be reckless – just like splogs – for trying to budge way into Google search returns and feed off of SEO. Search works best when you have a great product or idea and can talk about it clearly. When you try to game it, or try to make money for the sake of making money from it, it’s just being a selfish nuisance.
