Revenue sharing is coming to Mahalo Answers?

Fantastic! This is an amazing motivation that I haven't seen anywhere else on the Web, and I'm beyond psyched to see this in action. I'll be really excited to see the first figures role in and how it's going to work out.

Talk about changing the dynamic of Answers and putting a premium on quality questions and answers! I do have a question about the retroactivity: @jasoncalacanis, you said the program is not retroactive. Does that mean that just the *past earnings* are not retroactive, and that old questions/answers could still earn rev going forward?(IOW, if an answer of mine that I submitted in November earns M$5 in revenue next week, would I receive that rev share?) Or does it mean that only questions/answers posted from today and beyond will be eligible for rev share?

Thanks for rolling out this program. Wicked awesome!

I can be the most hyper-skeptical person in the universe when it comes to change but even I cannot see a real downside to this revenue sharing in Mahalo Answers. Revenue sharing looks to me like what I have wanted all along.. better questions and better answers. I have never been here for the money but the money never hurts and anything that promotes and rewards great questions and great answers it alright in my book.

I know there are people here that will be very thankful for another opportunity to earn here on Mahalo. Mahalo Answers has arrived. It now it seems to me there is a more equal effort/payment scheme throughout the three corners of Mahalo and every single area of Mahalo will be not only attracting the best and brightest but will be rewarding those who apply this shine to Mahalo Answers.. great job!

You have my full attention and I am excited to see this in action. :).

Great to be Mahaloian! This is the brightest idea I've been waiting for.

It is generous (and win-win too) for Mahalo to have this idea implemented. It is good utilization of resources (past questions, best answers) and it gives incentive for Mahaloians to promote them. Congratulations to Mahaloians who have lots of Questions and Best Answers.

But we should brainstorm to weed out and prevent potential problems and make it a better revenue channel for Mahalo and Mahalo users. It may have some unintended effects too. Some opinions/questions/suggestions: 1.

For asker, will the revenue sharing start only after a best answer is chosen? If it is, asker will have incentives to choose a best answer fast. This in a way will reduce old abandoned question (by asker) but it may also encourage fast closure of questions or simply choose an answer to be best even it should be “no best answer”.

Peoples may seek unanswered questions to answer too, which is good in clearing the system. 2. If a Mahalo account holder asks a question anonymously, how will the revenue be shared?

If he has a share on the revenue, Mahalo needs to be cautious not to expose the asker’s identity. If he doesn’t have a share, will the revenue be shared by Mahalo and best answerer 50:50? Peoples may then ask less anonymous questions.

Anonymous asker may also join as a member and not ask anonymously. This may solve partly problem of low quality anonymous questions. 3.

How to improve SEO of a question? Asker may ask question in a high-SEO way, for example proper tagging, keyword intensive questions etc.. which is good. 4.

What are the good ways and bad ways of promoting traffic to questions/answers? Mahalo may need to define it properly to prevent Mahalo or cyberspace be spammed by Mahalo Answers. Mahalo may need to prevent Mahalo be banned by social networking sites if spamming gets out-of-hand.

Once someone has a revenue either as the asker or the best answerer, he may tweet (or other social networks) out all his Q & BA. It may be a large spam, consider # of questions, best answers, # of users. I hope Mahaloians take it slow… don’t one-shot spam out all your questions and best answers.5.

The new spam will be “ask a question, choose a best answer fast, spam it out”. Mahalo may need to guard against this form of spam. This type of spam is riskier and harder to prevent.

Previously, spammer tries to spam their own websites in Mahalo to get traffic/revenue. Now, they will be in the system and Mahalo is the spamming website. It is harder to detect too.It is not difficult to pose valid question and nobody can question whether an answer is justified to be a best answer.

6. Peoples may do less of Mahalo Pages It will take less effort to pose question than to write a page (and all those editing, management stuffs etc..). Although revenue sharing is less for question (1/3) compared to page (1/2), question is a lot more easier.

Often, pagerank of question is higher than that of a page. It may be a good switch of business model if Mahalo Answers indeed gives better revenue.7. Would like to suggest Mahalo put AddThis on Answers so that question/best answer can be shared out to more channels.

http://www.addthis.com/features 200+ marketing channels.8. Would like to suggest Mahalo to have widgets, RSS feeds for user-specific questions (with best answers) and best answers. We will then be able to put this widget on our websites and it will be a less intrusive marketing tool.

Would be better if it’s an auto-scrolling widget. Maybe I’m asking for too much :-) RSS feed will be useful to feed it to Twitter, blog; automated and less of a spam.9.Is it possible to have Google Analytics on question/best answer so that users can know whether the “marketing” is done effectively?

Jason, and whoever else is responsible for making these sort of decisions. Thanks for making opportunities like these available. I have been bouncing around the web for over a year, trying to make a little pocket money between jobs and what I've found is this, Mahalo offer absolutely the best opportunity of anything I've seen.So again, thanks.

This is smart! And very generous. I know from Google Analytics that Mahalo Answer pages often get more views than Mahalo topic pages.

This will give us all an incentive to ask great questions and post our best answers, no doubt about it. But: Some of our highest viewed questions are of an adult nature, such as "How to last longer in bed? " So far these have been Conundrum questions, but they have been featured on Mahalo.Ad revenue sharing will encourage more of these types of questions.

Mahalo featured these questions, and so I know that Mahalo must approve of them. Not all users see it this way, though. I suggest that Mahalo put up very clear terms of service on what types of questions and answers are allowed.

Are there words which must not be in questions or answers? Some users are voting adult questions and answers unhelpful based on their opinion that these are inappropriate. If we have very clear terms of service to refer them to it will resolve these conflicts before they become the issue I see them becoming.

I'm not really one for replying to questions from the head honchos at Mahalo. There's plenty of others to do that! But it had to be said that this is an amazing idea.

Will be interesting to see some of the more "interesting" questions ripped from Conundrum too :) Thanks Jason.

This is GREAT! I bet the questions about ''how soon can you remove those bothersome ads'' will disappear.

You Reap what you Sow. @jasoncalacanis, you sir are a very wise planter. In my opinion you have placed desirable and viable seed into a fertile medium by implimenting this program.

The potential for yield is quite attractive. I like your vision! IMG

This is really exciting! I think it will raise the quality of the questions and answers-- making Mahalo Answers a more interesting destination. Sometimes my questions will rank ahead of pages-- this gives me a chance to earn ad sense from both!

I like the fact that Mahalo is always innovating, and thinking of ways to make the members of the community happier, and more excited about participating. Keep up the great work, Jason and Mahalo team!

Great new addition Jason! Looking forward to seeing how it shapes the community, it should really increase the number of quality answers we see here. Also I love the fact that going forward any old BA or Q we have within Mahalo Answers will earn going forward!

Great to see it finally here, and to see that old Q&A's are going to earn revenue sharing from here on out, too! I think this is going to be a game-changer!

Good idea Jason. Very innovative. It feel good working with great minds like the Mahalo team.

Keep up the good work.

I'm really happy about the new change :) I LOVE Mahalo Answers as my base here. I've been trying to find work that fits my part time work now and I have! I'm trying new pages but it's not my greatest talent for sure :( so hopefully this means I can now move up that payment list and hope to very very soon!

YaaY EDIT: I did have a question - you've posted a pic of what this looks like on the Answer page - what will the stats look like on our profile pages? Where will the adsense figure be and what sort of info will be included in our profiles to check how our adsense is going?

Awesome news. Not that I have very much to add to all the other answers, content wise, but I wanted to (a) thank Jason and the Mahalo staff for implementing this, and (b) to get email notifications on this thread :). One thing I do want to ask here, Jason, or Corey, will there be a new stat on our member page to show this separate income stream?

Will there be another aspect of the leader-board to show the top 100 members in this aspect? Lots of possibilities here...

Really, there's not much that I can say to this that hasn't already been said by the 32 people who answered before me, so I'll just say I like the idea, and thank you for implementing it. I pride myself on my questions anyways, so I'm looking forward to making money with good questions as well as good answers. I love that Mahalo seems to be going out of its way to allow people to make money, and I'm all for that!

Thanks, Jason and the rest of the Staff. You guys = rockstars.

This is truly a great improvement for all Mahaloians and truly generous in nature. I am participating more in tasks now but I'll check out Mahalo Answers more now!

Woo hoo, the day has finally arrived! I am SO incredibly excited about what thi will do fi Mahalo Answers! People are going to end up making A LOT of money - you just wait and see!

I love this idea. I think it will be very rewarding to the members who are active in the Answers community. It will probably also draw page managers back to being more active in Q and A's.

This is very generous of the folks at Mahalo to give even more $M back to the community! I especially like the fact that old questions and best answers will be eligible to earn revenue. Jason, you mentioned how ads are not shown for logged in members.

I know this has caused concern for page managers myself included due to the fact that you can't really see how your pages look when you are logged in. Will ads be coming back for logged in users?

I think it will be great to see some new and interesting questions come down the line. I'm very excited and hopeful that some really thought provoking questions become more common. Rather than searching for good questions to answer, there will be too many to choose from.

Of course, there are already some good questions out there but the bad ones outnumber them. I don't know if I saw this in the thread, but are anonymous questions still included in the revenue share or is this for non-anonymous questions only? I'm hoping for the second since I think the anonymity issue is part of what causes so many bad questions in the system.

Thanks Jason.

This is awesome. I'm excited. I was actually just starting to look into Adsense for my blogspot account, and now I get to learn about it here on my favorite website!

Can't wait!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! I just about died of happiness when I opened up the email with this announcement. Thank you Jason, you delightful man you, and everyone who has had anything to do with this.

Now it really is worth the effort to create the high-quality, sourced answers that we are supposed to be doing here. Bring it ohn. Yes I said bring it ohn.

This is a great idea, Jason! It got me to dust off my account and get involved. I plan on spending a night with Mahalo and really checking it out now.

Wow. I'm blown away! I know I'd heard about this coming, but I had no idea it was going to be so much!

Does the ad revenue then change as the question becomes more popular? This should shake Answers up, and help those of us who like spending time on Answers as much as Tasks have a good reason to spend more time answering and asking questions.

Thanks so much, Jason! I love doing questions, but made more doing pages. Now I can definitely tie the two together.

I see great potential for income in this, and I will definitely be asking and answering more questions now. Still, gotta create those pages first. Need to read this whole thread and see what we can and can't do.

Thanks again!

This is AWESOME NEWS! Looking forward to exploring the new concept! NOW WE WILL BE REALLY DRUMMING!

Thanks for all the upcoming fun!

This is great! Thank you so much! Can't wait for This Week in Mahalo tomorrow!

Thank you @jasoncalacanis Regards, @vladis.

Very innovative and brave! I am new here , but Mahalo is proving to be so much fun and rewarding at the same time. I sure hope this initiative becomes a major success.

Sounds like a great idea so far and got me to finally sign up for an account. My concern would be that people would be asking irrelevant or provoking questions on purpose that could be offensive. How do you plan to respond?

This makes me extremely excited. Thank you! :).

Really cool idea. I would have never thought about this. I'm not seeing the revenue ad but I'll be looking for it tomorrow.

You are a brilliant, kind and generous man. Thanks Jason love this idea.

Woah! Well this should certainly be astronomical in getting us further recognition on the virtual map, and a magnificent incentive for the best Q&A out there. Thank you so much!

Clearly, a lot of thought and planning went into this. Result? I will be factoring "Questions" into my other regular activities at Mahalo a WHOLE lot more!

Can't say enough good stuff - this is truly amazing. It's a great time to be a talented writer for Mahalo, it appears. Let's see how this flies!

VERY excited!

This sounds very exciting! I can't wait to get started! I think part of the reason this is going to work so well is because we have an absolutely awesome community who always provides entertaining and informative answers.

Other answers sites just don't provide the same value. This rocks!

This is brilliant! I must admit that you got a great brain and a good one too. This will be another reason that will put Mahalo way ahead of other similar sites (It's already matchless!).

Just great idea. Hats off!Thanks.

This is a welcome news and I am sure many will be more motivated to ask questions too. Thanks Jason for the innovative idea! I sure am proud to be a part of this interesting and growing community.

Yesterday I just got my payment and now I have two reasons to celebrate! Godspeed to all of us, to Jason and the Mahalo Team!

I heard about this idea a while back, and I really like it! My one note to @Jason and the Mahalo team is that many of the Answers question pages are swamped with far too many Google AdSense boxes! I think this really hurts the Mahalo Answers user experience.(Though I have not noticed ANY ads on Mahalo lately, I'm not sure why).

One new user commented this about them: "I asked a question last week & got an answer. I thought the person answering was also an ad spammer but I was mistaken. There were two ads above and below the answer.It was quite difficult to find the answer in that mess.

" That said, about this idea, I love it! I can't wait to get re-involved answering questions on MA!

Needless to say I wish I had a few hundred good questions in the system already! No time like the present.

Thank you so much, Jason. I do have a question, though. I am pretty computer illiterate.

Will there be instructions for linking a question to a page in the "how to" section? Thanks, again.

This is the most incredible idea I have ever seen. Hats off to @Jasoncalacanis|the mastermind behind a brilliant thought which I haven't seen on any other sites. Sometimes, when we search something in Google (because I only use it) we can see some of our questions in the 1st page within some time the question has been asked, which means the Google Bot crawls through the questions all the time.So I think this could be a great chance for people who ask questions a lot like @davepamn .

Also I think a clear description would help the question rank higher in the results. Well, there is else for me to say other than what the above folks have said. All I have to tell is I am waiting eagerly to see this feature implemented.

Hooray for Mahalo!

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.