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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
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Wikia Launch & Mahalo Growth
January 10, 2008
This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth.
The following chart shows the weekly share of US Internet visits to Mahalo and Cha-Cha over the past six months.
Mahalo may look huge relative to Cha-Cha so let me put that into context. Mahalo ranked 69th last week among Search Engines and received 0.02% of all US Internet visits to Search Engines compared with Google's 55.52%. We started seeing enough traffic to the site in July to report on it regularly and in the past three months, the site's visits are up 53%.
Mahalo appeals more to younger Internet users, 18-24 year olds in particular. The following chart compares Mahalo's visits by age group to the US online population. As you can see 18-24 year olds were 36.67% more likely to be on Mahalo.com than average.
Hitwise US: Mahalo.com Age Representation Compared to the Online Population
Four weeks to 5th January 2007
Mahalo receives most of its traffic from Search Engines (76% last week) and sends most of its traffic to Entertainment (37%) and News and Media (19%) websites. Visitors seem particularly interested in games websites such as GameSpot, IGN Cheats and Game FAQs and News and Media websites, in particular, Google News and other online news sources.
Mahalo is gaining momentum slowly but surely.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:15 AM
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Comments
Good SEO is the reason for the growth & mahalo is more like an about.com than a google or ask.com...The only reason they insist they are a search engine is because from a valuation standpoint the multiple for a seo based content business is not as attractive as a search business :)
Posted by Gopi | January 11, 2008 01:24 AM
Mahalo is about good SEO. Here is the analysis with an example:
http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2008/01/11/Mahalos-Source-of-Traffic-Analysis.html
Posted by Otis Gospodnetic | January 11, 2008 02:41 AM
The ideal is great, web 2.0 to the full. My worry is it will be run by admins who are fussy about which sites (too much advertising, etc) that they will add to their index.
Posted by Nozio | January 11, 2008 05:08 AM
Thanks for sharing info. Will sign up right now. I always looking for opportunities to promote my site www.lenkart.com for free.
Posted by Elena | January 12, 2008 01:21 PM
What's the sample size on this? Bearing in mind that 0.001% of the entire US population is c30,000 people, and Hitwise doesn't cover all the online population of the US (by a long shot), those figures are surely represented by a very small number of records in your data?
Or to put it another way - I'm not sure how robust those figures are...
Posted by Nick | January 16, 2008 05:21 AM
Nick - Our figures are based on a sample of over 10 million US Internet users. We are reporting the share of visits, rather than individuals, so the percentage is not based on the percentage of individuals that visited Mahalo but rather the percentage of all US Internet visits.
Also just to point to the third paragraph of my post in which I put Mahalo's figures in context...
"Mahalo may look huge relative to Cha-Cha so let me put that into context. Mahalo ranked 69th last week among Search Engines and received 0.02% of all US Internet visits to Search Engines compared with Google's 55.52%. We started seeing enough traffic to the site in July to report on it regularly and in the past three months, the site's visits are up 53%."
Cheers, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | January 16, 2008 12:22 PM
Mahalo is the people magazine of the internet. It's filled with the popular stuff, and if you put enough popular stuff in close proximity you start to generate traffic. It'll be interesting to see what Mahalo becomes, and whether or not they'll be able to keep the information and links fresh. Maintaining Mahalo doesn't figure to get cheaper over time.
/cliff
Posted by Cliff Gerrish | January 10, 2008 07:44 PM