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Comment by RBr | Hacker News Reader

Chartbeat was uber powerful for Mahalo. I'm not surprised that Jason Calacanis invested in it.

Mahalo lives-and-dies in grabbing headline traffic and monopolizing on both short and long-tail trends. Chartbeat shows exactly which pages are hitting. It's an easy to follow formula for updating pages on Mahalo. The system not only shows which pages are hot, but which pages are talked about on Twitter and shows very early trends from the SE's.

Jason would regularly encourage folks to use it before his investment. Seems like a good snag for him.

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You are 100% correct.

Last year we would see trends like StarCraft 2 come out, so we made pages like this:

http://www.mahalo.com/starcraft-2-wings-of-liberty-walkthrou...

Which we spend and make thousands of dollar on, and then double down by making videos on our Youtube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YzhojCvUYA

Some SEO folks claim we "spam" search engines, but the truth is we identify any page that gets over 1,000 views a month on Mahalo and we then spend $500 to $5,000 building it out.

The reason we are the #170th largest site on the web (and profitable), is because we use Chartbeat to find our winner and we DOUBLE DOWN on original content.

After we double down you know what we do?

We double down again! :-)

I love Chartbeat. It rocks. It's also helping us build out vertical Q&A sites like www.ipad-answers.com. We have three or four pages that break out on a site this every month, and we send amazing talent to those page and blow out amazing answers. Again, double down and double down again.

When you got the nuts you pound it.

Is any of this related to Chartbeats USP of it being real time? Sounds like any analytic package would show you which areas are receiving the most traffic in a time period.

It isn't like seeing trends now is different to seeing trends in a few hours given that you have to spend resources and time doubling down ...

I see the benefits for Mahalo 100% but for the average business who doesn't make money spotting trends but instead from optimizing their site conversions it falls short of helping. Don't just show the user real-time data, show them real-time improvements they can make, now that would be cool.

For Mahalo, the difference was immediacy. Mahalo had a lot of existing pages that did not provide adequate information. Remember that the vast majority of Mahalo pages were created automatically by a bot or by using outsourced labor that didn't do a very good job. They were ranked but crappy.

So, when a trend hit or for whatever reason, a page started to receive traffic, you could see it right away, add a bunch of content to it and then almost magically, push up it's search engine result position to snowball the page. For topics such as "Tiger Woods Affair", recall notices, etc, it worked really well.

Generating pages with inadequate information is in the same vein as throwing crap at a wall to see what would stick. It could be thought of as SE spam, but when quickly and carefully built out it was just the way that Mahalo worked.

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