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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

I think they see the "content mill penalty" writing on the wall and are pivoting to spamming YouTube in advance.

The ads seem to be way down, maybe they are trying not to look like a content mill while there is a heap of Google attention on the issue.

You are totally right about the ads being down. That's why it's so unfortunate/confusing that the how-to pages still feel cluttered. Visual clutter on sites like this are often just to make places for ads that "blend" in with content. But the new Mahalo has few ads.

As I wrote in my post: there are multiple sections of interesting information... presented in a disorienting manner.

I feel like the new learning mission is sincere, but am waiting for more tweaking.

Hadn't considered that. Can you expand a bit? I'm really into YouTube and would love to hear your theories.

I think it is a little harder to spam YouTube (with content) than the web. On the web, you can just parse feeds/spin text. On Youtube, you have to upload things. According to the presentation, they built out studios and are recording videos at a fast pace (and they do have thousands of videos on their channel, all with a signature white negative space backdrop). It is totally possible to make bad videos, not denying that. But it's a bit harder to trick systems into thinking there's something there that's not/misdirect.

Not saying there aren't other places in the system to abuse stuff (On YouTube you can friend spam, Fave-spam, etc), but it's hard to do with content.

Were you thinking content spam?

Instead of low-quality articles meant to get search traffic and AdSense revenue, these are low-quality videos meant to get search traffic and AdSense revenues. YouTube is the second largest search engine and also has a lot of space in Google SERPs.

It's also almost identical to Videojug, if you want to see how something like this plays out.

Our videos cost hundreds of dollars to make, are hosted by experts, shot in 1080p HD in a studio, have perfect audio and are on super clean white backgrounds (typically).

They are 10-50x better than most of the videos on YT in terms of quality and production value.

Most videos on YT don't have an expert and are shot on flipcams or iPhones with an open microphone, no lighting and background noise.

Our goal is to make HIGH-QUALITY videos that help people learn. If we do that we will be one of the top 25 sites in the US..... inside of three years.

You claim to be shooting for 500,000 videos in the next couple of years. There's no way that each cost hundreds of dollars (just $100 would make it $50M) and are all expertly made / edited.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/25/...

"The goal this year is to start creating (from scratch) 2,500 original videos per week in 4 studios at Mahalo's L.A. headquarters. And Calacanis says the goal over the next couple of years is to reach 500,000 original videos."

That's 625 "professional" videos per studio per week. Sorry Jason, I don't buy it.

Well, we never made low-quality content like Demand Media, but you are right that making high-quality videos with EXPERTS in them keeps us out of trouble with search engines.

Google will solve the ehow/demand media problem this year--or consumers will by blocking specific sites.

When that happens Mahalo's traffic should actually go up, because there won't be people with 11-year old spamming domains standing between us and teh top 10 results!

good observation!

You are right, Google is gearing to change its algorithm to start penalize pages instead of sites. Good sites with few bad pages will see that not all their pages are ranked. Whereas bad sites with few good pages will see that only their good pages are bringing traffic. So maybe this could be a nice motivation for bad sites to add more good pages.

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