MahaloAnswers Takes On ChaCha

by Jason Wilk on January 16, 2009

  • Since the launch of Jason Calacanis’ Yahoo Answers competitor, Mahalo Answers, I have been overly impressed with the strength the community has upheld as well as the quality of answers coming back from users. The service has been both helpful and sometimes addictive. Helpful for getting responses to answers I don’t have the time to go search for and addictive because there is always a new question that you think you can answer (in my case, I answer travel questions well).
  • Today the service took a new leap and it’s going head to head (sort of) with ChaCha, the SMS question/answer based search engine that let’s you text in a question and receive an answer from one of the thousands of guides getting paid per answer. On Mahalo Answers now, you can ask a question by email at home or on the go without signing in or even having an account (or paying for SMS fees). Just email answers@mahalo.com, the Subject line is the question and body of your email is question details. Opposed to ChaCha who pays their guides, it will interesting to see how the crowdsource model will work in terms of speediness in getting answer back (a big problem with ChaCha). When I first went in to speak with Tyler at Mahalo about this, I asked him about ChaCha. They weren’t sure how they would compete down that road, well today I got my answer. Very nice guys.

Update: You do need an account on Mahalo for right now. Currently being fixed.

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Tagged as: answers, jason calacanis, mahallo answers, mahalo, mahalo answers

  • johnnyW
    I'm a yellow belt too! Mahalo should have referral cash in there for bringing people.
  • Jason Wilk
    @ Brett, I am part of the community and now a yellow belt.
  • Actually, I can answer that..... Mahalo has ~150k uniques per day (5.2m uniques last month). We have 30 full-time staffers and a couple of dozen freelancers.

    We have had ~20k folks sign up for Answers so far.

    So, we're at best 50 of 20,000 folks on Mahalo Answers and of the top 100 users we are currently about 15 of them. My guess is that we will be < 10 of the top 100 users next month and after that we might not even be in the top 100.

    Seriously... relax. Mahalo is doing amazing and Answers is the third of five cards we've shown. When you see the next two you'll understand what we're building. Also, we'll hit 10m uniques a month in 2009 and I think at that point the doubters will have no choice but to admit that we're the most successful alternative search engines launched.

    Period!

    best j

    ps - we busting out asses to get there... so please save the hate Brett.
  • Please share your research. What percentage of the Mahalo community is paid staff, since you've clearly done objective research.
  • BS
    Congratulations, Brett Ahmed, you've just insulted 22461 people.

    http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Mahalosocialrank?...
  • Agreed. ChaCha has over 50000 guides and has answered questions for over 3 million people in the last year alone.

    When you have asked all the questions to need to know but still want to know how to make some money doing online surveys, visit my site www.surveyseeker.net and we will show you for free what others want to charge you for, how to make money doing online surveys. I do it and you can too.
  • Brett Ahmed
    Mahalo is crap, doesn't scale and doesn't have a real community, just the Mahalo staff. Do some research.
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