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The Mahalo Greenhouse Payments, and a Back of the Envelope Calcualtion

Posted on June 14, 2007
Filed Under Blogs and Blogging, Daily Links, Web 2.0 (Observations) |

And there’s part two. Jason Calacanis, while on his little trip to London (I suspect we’ll pass each other in Heathrow on Friday on either side of the security theatre barriers), has announced how he and the team behind Mahalo intend to reach the 10,000 ’search’ pages by the end of the year. He’s opening it up to the web community to write the pages, and successful writers will receive a payment starting at $10 (rising to $15 if you complete 50 or more pages). You also have the option of donating this payment to the Wikipedia foundation - although do note that non-US citizens have no choice but to donate the payment. Booo…

Mahalo Greenhouse

But that condition, and Calacanis’ statement of putting aside up to $250,000 for the Wikipedia Foundation, means some numbers can be crunched. Let’s assume that the US/rest of the world distribution of authors is close to what I see in other Web 2.0 sites, ie 40% US. So 60% of the articles will have payment going to Wikipedia. You have to assume that a good number of people doing articles in the US will also donate to Wikipedia (althoguh with the authors being screened, this might be a reasonable number). Gut feeling, let’s take 25% of the US authors donating the money to Wikipedia. Add some windage to those numbers by ignoring the sliding pay scale, and my feeling is that 70% of the articles to Mahalol will result in donations to Wikipedia.

Crunch those, and the Greenhouse project is aiming for around 36,000 user generated search articles in the first year. With around 4,000 in the system already, that means the stated goal, of 10,000 articles by year end (ie the first 7 months) is not only achievable, but well within one standard deviation of margin. And of course, if you’re a total cynic and think more people will keep the cash, then that means more pages if the quarter mill donation limit is still reached.

I wonder what the internal calulations at Mahalo are as to donations vs keeping the cash?

But the crunch (to my mind) is keeping those pages relevant. Information changes over time, and I’m interested to see how the maintenance of pages is going to go ahead, as opposed to the creation of pages. Calacanis standard model of a small management team, and then hire the people to do the content was perfect for the fire and forget nature of blogging (Weblogs, inc.) and Social Bookmarking (Netscape: The Next Generation), but is it suited to search engine pages? There’s got to be something else in the mix to be announced.

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