Vertical Managers and New Page Standards

In November 2009, Mahalo launched “Vertical Management”. Vertical Managers would be appointed to oversee pages by category. Vertical Managers are responsible for making sure pages meet with Mahalo standards and that they are being regularly updated. Vertical Management also changed the revenue share from being a 50/50 split between Mahalo and the Page Manager, to 40% to Mahalo, 40% to the Page Manager, and 20% to the Vertical Manager.

This new revenue split reduced the Page Manager’s earnings by 20%. For example, if a page earned $100, before Vertical Management the Page Manager would receive $50 Mahalo Dollars. Now, if a page was also being vertically managed, the Page Manager would only receive $40 Mahalo Dollars (a 20% drop).


Mahalo also began implementing new page requirements. This was actually a much needed change since many Mahalo pages lacked useful content or were badly written. To help with quality control, Mahalo made a call out to the Mahalo community asking for people to join the Mahalo QC Team. This team would be responsible for proofreading all new tasks (pages) and approving or denying submitted tasks. So I replied that I would like to join the QC Team, and was quickly invited to join. Here is the email I received from Mahalo Staff Member, Anne Keehn, on 12-3-09:

You've been a great page manager... and we'd love to have you on the QC team!!!

Mahalo put together some pages to be used as guidelines for managing Mahalo pages: How to Write a Mahalo Page and Mahalo Page Management Guide. So I used these guides when updating my pages to make sure they met with at least the minimum requirements. Per the Mahalo Page Management Guide (as of 4/6/10), these were the page requirements:

1. Pages must have over 300 words of original text.
2. Pages must have at least 5 Fast Facts.
3. Pages must be objective and neutral.
4. Pages must be edited every 7 to 10 days.
5. Pages must include citations.

I started going through my pages as quickly as I could to get them up to these new standards. I also responded as quickly as I could to requests from Vertical Managers to update pages. There were times when it got pretty overwhelming, but I did the best I could to keep up. I even put off doing any QC’ing for the QC Team because I wanted to get all my pages updated before taking on any additional work. For a lot of pages it’s hard to come up with 300 words. For example, many of my pages are coupon pages. So really, how much can you really say about a coupon? So it did take me a lot of research to try to find out what else I could add to the page. I also checked other top users’ profiles to see if they had all of their pages updated, and they did not. So I assumed that my progress was sufficient and that I was not behind.

Now from what I have written here and in my previous post, it is plain to see that Mahalo considered me to be a dedicated and trusted Mahalo member. So what caused Mahalo to do a 360 and start treating me as if I was not a good page manager?