There is a recent post on Valleywag that says Mahalo, the human powered search engine, has revenues of just $9,000/month. At first I found this very hard to believe since Mahalo receives close to 4 million monthly visitors. If you compute these numbers into an EPV you get earnings of less then $0.01 per visitor with a paltry Bizak Estimate of $432,000. If these numbers are correct then you have to assume that Mahalo is not profitable and likely spends at least what it earns in server costs – thus making that EPV (EPV definition) zero or less than zero.
Mahalo was launched just last year so one would assume that creating a brand, generating traffic and perfecting their product is their initial concern? Monetization will come later? However, based on their current revenue model, Google Adsense, and the fact that 80% of their traffic comes from search engine optimization (via Google) you might be more likely to believe that the $9,000/month is correct. If this number is correct then it just furthers my belief that Google Adsense has become worthless, especially when your topics revolve around pop culture.
There is some talk that the reason why Mahalo’s revenues are so low is because their traffic comes from search and not repeat visitors. I would agree with some but not all of this statement. True, visitors from Google might be more immune to Google Ads – they ignored them on Google.com and therefore are more likely to ignore them on Mahalo.
This could definitely be true but what’s probably more important in determining their poor revenues is what people are searching for (on Google) to get to Mahalo.
At first glance Mahalo has a lot of celebrity gossip topics. These keywords & celebrities account for a lot of internet searches, however they aren’t very valuable for advertisers. People searching for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton tend to be young, clickaholics, and don’t pay for anything online. If one of them does click on the ads then Mahalo is lucky if they make a penny.
If Mahalo is earning $0.01 for every Google Adsense click then that means Mahalo needs 900,000 clicks/month to make the estimated $9,000 revenues. That’s a lot of clicks, especially considering that equates to a 22% CTR (900K/4M) for Google Adsense. A 22% CTR is not likely. Double the earnings ($0.02), half the clicks (450,000) and you still get a CTR of 11%. I think this goes to show that Google Adsense is not a good revenue model.
Another possibility for Mahalo’s poor (estimated) revenues could be because their site is very informative! No site they link to is as thorough and succinct as they are – so why leave the site for another?
I like Mahalo but I’ve never made them money.
