Hey, Mahalo / Calacanis Haters: Analyze This!

Go ahead, have another snicker at human-powered search engine Mahalo and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's expense. Then take a look at these recent Mahalo traffic trends.

Uniques
July: 177,481
August: 314,897
September: 745,262
October: 1,407,730
November: 1,726,669
December: 2,353,138

Yes, those numbers are from internal Mahalo Google Analytics logs, and, no, Mahalo wouldn't have provided them to us if they had sucked.  But while you're pooh-poohing the objectivity, ask yourself whether you really should be cackling about a site that attracted 2.4 million uniques in its sixth month. (Did yours?)

True, Compete shows only 600,000 uniques for November, but Compete only measures U.S. traffic, and, more importantly, the steady upward trend is the same:



Here are some more encouraging details, also per the company:

• Mahalo Social is getting 100 new members a day and 300 submissions a day. The social networking will grow to 500-1,000 new accounts a day in Q2, and 5,000 links/day suggested.
  
• 20 full-time folks just process incoming links. So, the most expensive part of the job--looking for links--is now gone. We simply watch the links coming in and ban the spam, and promote the good stuff.
• "This is sort of like having a staff look at every delicious, stumbleupon, or digg story coming in. No one has ever really done that. Sure, it costs a million dollars a year, but the result is going to be epic."
  

We'll withhold judgment on that last adjective, but based on the last six months-worth of traffic trends, Mahalo is cranking. Wonder when the Calacanis bashers will notice?

See Also:
Calacanis's Mahalo Doing Quite Well, Actually
Mahalo 2.0: Calacanis Adapts