Mahalo: 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. 
Jason is not 100% Jim McCormick, but he isn’t 0% either.
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