Calacanis Could Have Made Mahalo Profitable

Mike Buechele at 1115Media - I read a post over Cost Per News that Jason Calacanis is still referring to Affiliate Marketing as spam. Jason was the key note speaker at Affiliate Summit West last year, where he first mentioned Affiliate Marketing as spam, but did go on to say that the industry is filled with very smart people. For a few weeks after the conference it looked like Calacanis was starting to get it and would try out Affiliate Marketing on Mahalo. However, it looks like he’s sticking with Google for now.

Now there are spammers out there that do use affiliate links in scrapped websites that add no value and waste our time. Those that are succeeding in Affiliate Marketing are building larger sites that add value to the user experience, and are also using a lot of back end tech to deliver products and services with affiliate links. Much like Mahalo could have been doing all this time.

I really like Mahalo, not everything they have but most of it. The ironic part of Jason Calacanis’ misunderstanding of Affiliate Marketing, is that if Mahalo integrated affiliate links with all that great content, both user generated and static, they would be hiring and not laying people off during the holiday season.