Starving Artists in the Age of Cesspool Content

On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model

Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.

Let's say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don't mention who the band is and on their website, they put up a link to download the song... but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, "hey, playing good songs gets us more listeners and more listeners gets us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let's do this more often." So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve.

Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.

In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.

Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.

The analogy isn't 100% perfect...but it *is* pretty darn close. :D

Jason is not 100% Jim McCormick, but he isn't 0% either.

You Like! Please Share
  • Digg
  • TwitThis
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Webnews
  • Y!GG
  • MySpace
  • Technorati
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Google

You might also like

Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Wants Your Blood (And Gets it TOO!) Mark Cuban recently talked about how search engines and content aggregators are vampires. There is no...
More PROOF Jason Calacanis is a ____ Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google...
What Does $14 Million Worth of PageRank Look Like? From Hitwise: CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction...
Why Mahalo (and Other Content Scrapers) Render Google’s Spam Team Flaccid I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media's CEO spoke, and he stated...
Grab This Widget

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

(required)

(required)