How Sequoia Venture Capital Will Pop the Bubble of Web 2.0 – Mahalo or MFAhollow?
Online marketing information can change quickly This article is 13 years and 238 days old, and the facts and opinions contained in it may be out of date.
Starting the ridiculous round of investment in such a terrible idea. Continue doing this, and the end will definitely be near. This is so bad I will even give them a link (though I’ve decided it should contain the anchor text “squidoo crackbaby”). Seriously – if you guys are GIVING away money to shit like this, I’ve got an awesome bridge in Brooklyn that we can put google ads on. Scraped content commented on by people who are too lazy to get a real job? I’m sure the quality control level should stay very high, and there will be no incentive for payoffs on terms like “mortgage” (because that never happend on dmoz). Why not listen to some folks that know about search, and social media for investment advice and ideas in the space, instead of a guy with a giant ego that knows how to job jump? This cute little hawaiian phrase is gonna be the pets.com sock puppet of this era. Maybe high risk is good, but putting the money into this project is just the first sign that NO ONE with the money has much of a clue what is really going on, and that they’re only going to learn the economics of search the really hard way. Please stop the madness. I generally try to only write positively – but this was just too much to take without ranting, after all the BS we’ve seen spewed from this man just to get a reaction.
12 Reasons this is the worst idea ever and will never make money
- No real business model – Adsense is not a long term solution for a search engine.
- Shitty relevance – just because they’re people – doesn’t mean they’re smart.
- There is no google killer – there will be one google – at this point, we can only hope to contain them – the barrier to entry is far to high. How hard is it for them to snag and change the best ideas, or worst case, buy them out? Pick a narrow niche, and hope for a buyout, or an area where they’re weak, and get entrenched before they smell ya comin’.
- Aggregating content is not a $100 million dollar value add – A good programmer will make you a mashup MUCH cheaper, and there is plenty of ways to DIY.
- This was actually a pretty good idea the first time around – it was called Squidoo – and philanthropic motives helped it to get much closer to a tipping point than this ever will.
- Just because something is promoted with a negative energy, and becomes remarkable, doesn’t mean it will STAY remarkable and succeed. I might tell people ABOUT it – but not to use it.
- Paying people peanuts is not going to generate expert content. True motivation MIGHT, but I don’t really see the founder as a positive leader of men.
- Zero Trustrank (though this can probably be overcome though)
- G will stop indexing at some point (I hope they have a good PPC person for driving traffic)
- It’s a squidoo crackbaby – skinny (with content), diseased (with terrible ideas and aweful relevance), and needy (asking for money).
- Who the hell believes this will be a scaleable solution to good information?
- There is a name for people who write content on the web – they’re called bloggers, and they can make plenty more money writing on their OWN site, and keeping all of the ad money, once they figure out the distribution channels.
Sequoia’s VC’s are either really really smart – knowing that when people give up on a google killer, it will further inflate G’s stock, or really really stupid (believing that an MFA SE will work). To the other investors – social proof is not always a positive thing. Yes – there are plenty of smart folks on board, but just because Mark Cuban is generally a smart guy and has lots of money, does not mean he is always right.
More (why not listen to people who KNOW about search and what works?)
Threadwatch
Valleywag
Scoreboard – Mahalo Sucks
Tropical SEO
Search Engine Land
MFAhalo?
MFA Hollow?
(Just in case the VC’s don’t get it – MFA stands for MADE FOR ADSENSE – known as a pretty terrible long term business model in the SEO community – next time get a couple of SEO types, the folks who focus on REAL money making models, to give their two pennies if something will work making this kind of impulse buy.)

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