oh snap, time to buy something, jason. - ishak from twhirl

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Are these stats inaccurate for some reason? - Andrew Baron

Alexa reports same. Verdict: email newsletters not the killer marketing app. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

It was a dumb idea to begin with? - Jason Carreira

actually, we had two record months in the past four and August--the slowest month of the year--looks like another record. Not sure why compete shows flat, but it's sample based. Also, note that compete is only US traffic.... only 60-65% of our traffic is US. so, we're well over 4m uniques a month. - Jason Calacanis

Rocketboom is a very different kind of a site than Mahalo Daily and they can't be compared in this way. Aside from YouTube, Mahalo Daily has hardly any subscribers on other off-site platforms and very few RSS subscribers. [for RB data, see http://dembot.com/post... and http://tinyurl.com/6gkjw9 ] Thats why I was asking if anyone knew of a reason why Mahalo [the website] might be flat. - Andrew Baron

@jason Whatever # they do come up with, X, Compete knows that X will grow of fall based on the same factors (for the most part). So if they say Mahalo is flat, then the % of flatness is real, at least compared to their own control factors. Since you claim that your stats are up, all that upness must be elsewhere in the world but we can at least infer that you have not had any growth in the US marketplace. Im not sure if the US is important to you or not, but I would assume that is. - Andrew Baron

you're both slivercasting to the same demo as techtv. episodic tech coverage does not equate viral video. getting it on a sony bravia is cool, but where does that lead? buy my tv and you can have xyz content. the Net needs to be user-centered and free, not centralized. @noneck deported from china doesn't happen when major sponsors are involved. - ishak from twhirl

Compete's data is 100% bogus for the sites where I know the actual numbers (e.g., mine, and where I work). I wouldn't trust their data at all. - Stephen Mack

@Stephen, what is your comment to my explanation above about the X+ or X- factor of the report? - Andrew Baron

How is Rocket Booms numbers Andrew? Flatter than a pancake? - Fred Grott

Don't think you can infer much from a graph like this in isolation. Check out techmeme. It had a five month hiccup back in sep 07 (according to compete) and now look at its growth. Was techmeme in trouble? Should it have closed up shop? No. Now if you're seeing a significant drop or flatlining relative to other sites, like say powerset, then maybe there's a segment wide trend or something going on relative to the segment. Oh, and for kicks check out the broader industry such as apple, microsoft, and amazon or better yet google, yahoo, and live.com. Not sure what you can infer from any of this other than live.com is getting more traffic while just about everything else is near flat. Hmmm. - Loren Heiny

::grabs some popcorn :: - sean percival

The point is the underlying data is a sample and not statistically accurate for any site. and Andrew should have known better given his own sites performance - Fred Grott

Fred, you are still missing the point. I asked the question right off the bat. To your other comment, if you read my blog post on Compete, you can see where several months ago I predicted RB would be flat. I actually predicted a slight decline since we changed the entire directory of our website urls too - being in limbo waiting on the Sony deal to close. But Fred, you comment is actually a fallacy called "tu quoque". My argument is that Mahalo is flat and you have not confirmed that its flat, except indirectly by agreeing with the flatness in discussing Rocketboom. So regardless of your Tu Quoque and Jason Ad hominem, Mahalo has been flat in the US for many, many months. Not just one month, or one hickup, but many, many, many months. - Andrew Baron

Fred's argument is that you should have known the data you were pointing to was inaccurate, as you can compare your own site's performance to what Compete states and note the discrepancy. It's not a tu quoque argument. - Mark Trapp

In most stats classes they teach that before you use any data you use some basic math to verify its accuracy. - Fred Grott

@Mark, please read my comment above about X+ and X-. Here it is again: Whatever # they do come up with, X, Compete knows that X will grow of fall based on the same factors (for the most part). So if they say Mahalo is flat, then the % of flatness is real, at least compared to their own control factors. Since he claims that his stats are up, all that upness must be elsewhere in the world but we can at least infer that he has not had any growth in the US marketplace. Im not sure if the US is important to you all or not, but I would assume that is. - Andrew Baron

I dont trust these sites to give accurate data. lets try this http://siteanalytics.compete.com/rocketb... - Peter Dawson

Andrew: Your argument is a valid counterpoint to Fred's argument. His counterpoint to that counterpoint is that you can use basic statistics to show the inaccuracy of that method of metric. My point stands, however: his argument wasn't fallacious. Furthermore, using fallacies as the basis for disproving an argument is, in and of itself, fallacious: argumentum ad logicam. Argue to his point, not the rules. - Mark Trapp

Andrew if the underlying data is not statically accurate than any conclusion you make is also incorrect no matter how much feelings you have attached to it.. - Fred Grott

In otherwords, even if the number is WAY LOW, that's not my point. The point is that Compete has not changed how they determine the number so if there was growth, it will be seen visually. Too, if it stays flat, we know that Mahalo is truly flat. There is really no other way around this. - Andrew Baron

Deleting comments are we? Let's try again with a tweet... Maybe Jason should ask his dad to buy him some more traffic - Jason Carreira

Now this is a great conversation and shows why FriendFeed is a great site. Social Media at its best right here - Dave Peck

@Jason you are just adding noise. Why do you and all of your friends attack people so much? Why not contribute to the conversation. This is the kind of behavior that people exhibit when they get nervous and dont have a counter argument. But to address your point, as far as I know, Jason has a lot of sugar daddies that gave him a major round with tons of cash to start Mahalo. He could ask his daddies to buy him some traffic. He may need to do exactly that. - Andrew Baron

Andrew, one side of my sez that I agree with you. The computional methods have not changed so therefore it has to be true. The other side of me still sez that the statical data could be wrong, and therfore my first assumption could be wrong too. Secondly , you are pointing out flatness on a property when you know that specific owner has also stopped bloggin on that property. That could be an indicator to traffic /user behvaiour, in terms of, email is not the channel for dsitrubtion. - Peter Dawson

Those stats on Mahalo are particularly inaccurate if you compare them to the Quantcast graphs: http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo... - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Mark, Quantcast shows a different story here: http://www.quantcast.com/profile... - Andrew Baron

Jason ought to read the Cluetrain Manifesto for an idea about how to deal with the outside world. His approach is very 20th Century, it used to work when there weren't a billion ways for bad news to leak out and it was possible to fully control the channels of communication. He still can intimidate people into shutting up, but that, as we can see, doesn't help build flow for a community-oriented business like Mahalo. Better to incorporate the feedback, ask for ideas, and try to do better (and say so). - Dave Winer

What's really odd (and wrong) is that he presents himself as a mentor to entrepreneurs. He should show them that graph Andrew and say "I'm teaching you how to build a business like Mahalo." And watch the room empty out, fast. - Dave Winer

@Dave I think you nailed it on his approach. He seems to always miss these opportunities to befriend people and gain more support for his project. - Andrew Baron

On an interesting thread, most interesting thing I've seen is Mark Hopkins bringing in the Quantcast numbers -- proves out the sometimes wild differences between the major analytics services. - Eric Berlin

I don't know who Andrew Baron is or his Rocketboom company... but I love how Friendfeed creates this conversation. Great tool! - Julio F ~ @SocialJulio

The Google Trends numbers, which are global, also look flat/declining for Mahalo.com over the past 6 months: http://trends.google.com/website... - DeWitt Clinton

it doesn't surprise me since it requires quite a lot of energy to compile useful information together. Who wants to compile information for Mahalo? Not me. - James Robertson

I said last year, and still believe today, that the problem with Mahalo is that they didn't have a good proposition for authors or developers. Had he put more money on the table, or more recognition, or got hugely creative and found a way to make key developers into equity partners, something big might have happened. Look at how much Twitter has grown in the last year, look at FriendFeed! Growth was available. Just not the way he was approaching the community. - Dave Winer

@Dave Mahalo and Twitter/FF are apples and oranges. Mahalo is a reference site, and Twitter/FF are communications enablers. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

He really had a chance at Gnomedex, to engage the community. Everyone seems to have accepted his spin, but that's only one point of view. The place was full of ideas, he didn't hear any of them. That's not good CEOing, imho. His method of community development is to get attention for himself -- that worked for Engadget et al, but won't work for Mahalo, where the attention has to be on lots of stars. Like Twitter, for example. :-) - Dave Winer

Mark, yes -- I know what they are. But a creative product designer looks far afield for ideas to make his idea bloom, esp when things aren't going that well. Somehow Twitter managed to get people to pour their hearts into their product for $0, yet Mahalo hasn't gotten people to do that for $10 per hour. I'm sure there's something to learn there. But if you shut out opinions you don't like you never learn and you get a growth curve like this one. - Dave Winer

The problem with Mahalo is not Jason Calcanis... well, the main problem at least... the main problem is that searching and indexing done by HAND does not scale as fast as the internet does... It's a linear solution to an exponential problem. It worked fine back when I found things on the NCSA start page and Cool Site of the Day, but in today's internet? - Jason Carreira

Not that Andrew is one to talk : http://trends.google.com/website... - Jason Carreira

@Dave, I'm not sure Jason has been shutting out opinions (maybe lately, but not always). I can't remember if it was Andrew or Drama 2.0 or someone else, but Jason definitely took a lot of heat for doing the "Open CEO" thing and too often asking the opinion of the public for the early direction of the company. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

I don't use Mahalo as a search engine, but the idea of "editorializing" search results by hand is not a bad one. And I don't think it has to scale to the whole net. That would be like arguing that a newspaper has to cover all news. Mahalo is a niche way to find things, like techmeme, news.google.com, alltop, etc, etc, etc. I think the near term trend is for more sites like this, not fewer. - Loren Heiny

The problem with Mahalo is that it's not interesting and not very helpful. Google does a good job most of the time so there's little reason to look elsewhere. When it first arrived on the scene I thought it would be an interesting little project but it's become more cluttered and less helpful so I went back to Google full time. - Brett Nordquist

Here it is the next day & the Mahalo=Flat thread w/ the other posts below have mostly died down. Minus the personal attacks, a lot of people provided a lot of great context. My conclusion is that Mahalo is indeed flat right now. I have a hypothesis that this spells the end of the road for Mahlo, but I dont even have enough info to call it a theory. I.e. I dont know what will happen, maybe it will rise way up. However, I do believe Mahalo has been very flat for a long time. - Andrew Baron