Right. Demand Media has a distributed, virtualized workforce of freelancers. (Read the Wired article on it. That is some of their best reporting. Ever.) Mahalo used to have in-house editors before they moved to mostly outsourced "editors" before they realized editors cost a lot of money and firing them didn't decrease revenues in the slightest. At the moment their editorial staff is a thin pretense maintained to keep the site from getting bounced out of the index.

Disclaimer: As with most other massive content plays which have large audiences of unsophisticated Internet users, I indirectly subsidize Mahalo through AdSense expenditures. To the tune of probably over a hundred bucks last year, but I don't have my numbers in front of me. Like I mentioned in my blog post earlier today, they send great traffic (i.e. it is cheap and converts well) because my ads are the content on their pages.

That is disquieting to me in some ways. I could ban them and start chopping off heads from the Demand Media hydra in my AdSense account, but that would consume vast amounts of my time and just cost me money.