04.18.08
Call in the Robots, no more outsourcing, I’m looking at automation
For a long time I was competing in my own way with Mahalo.com Jason Calacanis’s human powered search site. The formula was simple, take the Google.com/Trends data, then sort through the most "ownable" terms which was basically defined as anything with fewer than 10k competing pages and have a girl in India create a blog post about them. This is not quite Jason’s model, he was creating pages for every term, but as he has Sequoia’s VC money behind him, and I only have my own money, I had to generate revenue to pay for the content creation.
The model worked. I could recoup about 10% of the pages the first day, and 40% the first month, and the rest I’d lose money on, but taking a 6 month average all pages would break even and begin earning money. The problem is I don’t really have the bank roll to sponsor 6 months worth of posts to make $5 on each of them. The model doesn’t work that well.
If I write the posts most of the time I can make $5 the very first day, and for several days after that, but my time is worth more than $15 an hour.
So I needed a solution that would create pages at least equal to the quality of a Mahalo.com post, and created at zero cost.
Using nothing more than my server and content that is available through various web API’s. The results are a bit slow if you are the first person to search a term, but caching makes the results fast for the next person.
If you’d like to be in the beta, contact me (Brandon at XYHD.tv) I’ll point you to the site.
I’m still in the process of picking a domain, all the good ones are taken, but likely I will have several, each tuned for different types of searches.
I was blown away that there is not a good "classification" tool on the web, basically just to sort, this X term is of type Y. Like Britney Spears is a Person, Paris France is a Place.
My results could be a lot better if I had this because then I’d know where to look for types of queries. No worries I can build that in to the logic later, or make that part of the human part of the equation.
Jason said,
April 18, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I think in order to compete with the folks out there (not just us) you’re going to have to invest $10-25 per page and take a 36 month view on breaking even on the page. You’re also going to need to do it for like 2-3 years… but I applaud your insight into the business.
best jason