Talk about getting its ass-kicked by Google’s Panda Update, Mahalo’s been hit pretty hard. Jason Calacanis, the founder, has never been shy about how his site gets traffic - by paying writers cheaply to crank out content for the top Google keyword searches. In other words, an SEO play - a content farm. Now that that’s not working anymore - in relative terms because they still have millions of monthly users - they’re gonna apply the same SEO model on another ecosystem. Mahola will move into building iPhone apps, cranking out one per week. It’s not the first time that someone has applied the SEO strategy to iPhone apps, and that company has been shutdown and its apps deleted - thousands of them. It makes me wonder how long this strategy will last with Mahalo. With hundreds of thousands of iPhone apps, it’s just a matter of time before Apple throws in a Google-like algorithm that filters out low quality apps. When that time comes, I’m guessing Mahalo will move on to another ecosystem...

… like what Hyperinks is doing with e-books. Instead of paying a writer to spend a couple years writing an e-book, they will instead browse through Google Trends and pay he/she to crank one out in a month for a trending topic. Again, I see this working in the short term until Amazon (or other e-book distributors) starts to apply Panda-like filters to their results. I do see one benefit to this method, and that is it’s more timely. You can’t be timely when you have to spend a couple years writing about a current hot topic. That is if it’s done properly, but since they’re aiming to monetize the longtail, l bet they’re going for “less product value” and “more monetization” like the app company that was shutdown by Apple.

I think eventually both of these companies will be pushed into a corner where they’ll have to comply with the platform’s terms - which is to produce higher quality apps and e-books. I’m already seeing this with content farms that were penalized by Google. They’re trying to produce higher quality content instead of just cranking stuff out. More realistically, they’re probably producing a mixture of high and low quality content, but the overall quality is improving.