Mashable Fired Federated Media in January

Pete Cashmore went on Old Media raw data buffet Bloomberg West today, and amongst other things, let slip that Mashable fired Federated media. He followed up with a rare post on Mashable proper:

How are we fueling this growth? Among other big moves this year, Mashable took over its own ad sales at the start of 2011 – ads had previously been handled by our ad partner. This more than doubled our ad revenue, allowing us to grow the team, expand our coverage, and bring on seasoned journalists like San Francisco Bureau Chief Chris Taylor (formerly of Fast Company).

This does explain the massive personnel growth Mashable’s been displaying this year.

Here’s the problem with Mashable (without going into my petty quibbles with current and former staff members): Mashable still relies on CPM ad models, and thus severely undervalues the market position they hold.

SiliconANGLE has been functioning quite highly on our data-based revenue model for quite some time (I’d have to check my calendar, but I’d say it’s coming up on a little over a year now), and while our data-based revenue model is nascent, I’d be proud to put the financials of Mashable and SiliconANGLE side-by-side and see which one values work output more highly.

CPM, CPC, and CPA are dying models. Try as you might, you can’t compete against the likes of a Demand Media or a Business Insider. Demand has cost of content production to a fine science, and Business Insider has absolutely perfected and picked up tripe-printing where World Weekly News left off. The BI/WWN model is as profitable as The Onion; that is, when you don’t hafta waste time on research, you can print a lot of outlandish crap in great quantities.

Time for innovation. Should Mashable actually do some business model innovation, they’d be unstoppable.

Thankfully, it appears that most of my old co-workers no longer read my blog, and my new secret to success is safe for now.

Mashable Launches a Comment Policy [How The Mighty Have Fallen]

Today, Mashable’s hard earned sales dollars were finally put to good use, when the newly hired community manager Vadim Lavrusik, in his first official act, posted a commenting policy for the site. The post was put up three hours today, and judging from the number of shares and the number of times it’s crossed into my field of vision, it’s by far their most popular piece of content today.

What sort of guidelines has the man with the banhammer set down?

1. Personal Attacks: Please don’t engage in personal attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), persistent trolling or mindless abuse. The Mashable community should focus on intelligently discussing topics by furthering the conversation and informing the participants with resourceful and constructive ideas.

2. Hate speech: Racism, sexism and homophobia will not be tolerated.

3. Language and Threats: Please watch your language and respect other people’s views, beliefs and emotions. We reserve the right to remove any content that might be found extremely offensive or threatening.

4. No Spam: Spam and advertising content will be removed.

5. Smear Tactics: Although we acknowledge criticism of our articles and our writers, we will not allow misrepresentation. We will distinguish between constructive arguments and smear tactics.

6. Relevancy: Please keep conversations relevant. Off-topic comments are subject to removal in order to keep the thread on track.

7. Quality: We encourage you to take responsibility for the quality of the conversations in which you’re participating. Maintain intelligent discussions in the Mashable community by being respectful and considerate.

8. Help us: Maintain an inviting interaction space by self-policing threads and flagging spam. Although we have a hands-on approach to community engagement, we do sometimes miss problem commenters or trolls. We appreciate your efforts to keep the Mashable community environment inviting, insightful and constructive. Let the conversations be quality ones.

The first rule on the list pretty much ensures, were I to go back to Mashable today, that I would be promptly fired. I consistently had editorial pieces with the highest number of comments during my tenure, but also consistently drew the most ire from the commenters.

I’m not sure if it was inspired by my commenters or not, but during my tenure at the company, there were comment contests dubbed “Troll Week,” that usually came around in time for the winter holidays.

Contrast Vadim’s post with Pete’s from three years ago:

This week’s Thanksgiving celebrations start the countdown to that sickeningly over-commercialized “non-denominational winter holiday” formerly known as Christmas. Frankly, that makes us grumpy. So grumpy that we feel the need to insult someone. You, preferably.

After your abject failure to thoroughly grill us during Troll Week, you’re getting a second chance. “Deck The Trolls”, a festive contest in which you’re rewarded for witty and amusingly insulting comments on Mashable posts, starts today and ends whenever we feel like it.

Unlike before, you can’t win on a single comment. Instead, we give credit for the following troll-like behavior:

–Insults
–Sarcasm
–Wit
–”First!”
–This week only: bonus points for including the word “turkey” somewhere in your insults

At the end of each week, we’ll reward the snarkiest troll with a $100 voucher for iTunes, the Apple Store or Amazon, depending on your trolly preference. But since you really need no excuse to lob insults our way, we’re also happy to send the money to a charity of your choosing.

The catch: only posts with the following image in the footer are included in the contest. Troll me, bro!

In all seriousness, though, even though the idea of a troll contest may not be the best in the history of blog comment contests, don’t you think it’s a sure fire way to get more personality injected into a blog than a dry list of don’ts like the most recent list?

I understand that Mashable’s success has rested on being mainstream, and generalizing, dumbing down and blandifying the content – but more than one competitor has said “Mashable’s jumped the shark” in the privacy of a restricted forum.

I’m just saying – they mayhaps should have thought this through. Probably not the best way to jazz up your community than to show them the big ol’ banhammer on your first day.

Update: I forgot – the whole reason I wrote this post was to work in this little snide crack at Mashable… I asked Editor-in-Chief (and my former boss) Adam Ostrow today on Twitter whether or not this was the official death of the Winter Troll contest. He has declined to comment thus far.

Does Meetup Have a Spam Problem? Or is Mashable Inflating Numbers?

So I was tooling around the internet tonight, and somehow ended up over at Mashable.

As you know, if you hang out on Mashable at all, that it’s pretty well populated with ads. Still, one (presumably) new ad sort of stood out to me.

According to this widget/ad on the site, worldwide, there exist over 1,463 Mashable Meetups with nearly 15,000 registered attendees.

With that many meetups (and the recent surge in popularity for Mashable) that it might be no big deal for me to waltz into the closest one to me and try to cash in on my status as one of the first associate editors of the site to promote, well, me and my current work at SiliconANGLE.

So I clicked on the link “Find one near Carrollton,” the suburb of Dallas where I live.

The pickings for Dallas area Mashable Meetups were pretty slim – not surprising since Mashable has always passed on Dallas as a tech center to hold events at (despite that it was one of the strongest hotspots for tech in the past and current booms in America).

I clicked on the most populous meetup location in the area, the one in Arlington. It seemed strange since it’s a bit out of the way for most of the tech community in the area (though it is centrally located to both Dallas and Fort Worth).

Interestingly enough, it was organized by someone with a foreign sounding name, most of the attendees had foreign sounding names. Again, that’s not totally unexplainable, since Dallas is a diverse city with many different cultures counted amongst it’s populace.

What was puzzling was that the RSVP link was listed as http://www.mycolonic.com/. A click onto the link confirmed that it was, indeed, a website devoted to colonics, in that SEM jamming, spammy sort of way.

The meeting organizer didn’t appear to be local to Dallas, nor did a random sampling of attendees.

As best as I can tell, through a random sampling of other cities, there were a great deal other meetups created either for the sole purposes of creating link-juice for SEO spammers or for bumping up the numbers for Mashable, to make it look like a large number of folks are interested in sitting in a group and discussing Mashable posts in their own cities.

Either way, something is fishy. Meetup.com has a serious problem with spam, or Mashable is hiring folks to create false meetups in random locations so as to appear popular.

Achtung Austinites!

Hey. Just wanted to quickly alert everyone that I’m putting out the next list post in the series on Austin tomorrow afternoon, which means I’m adding all the suggestions to the OPML file today. This post is going to focus on Austin area social media and Web 2.0 companies with RSS feeds!

If you have something you feel like should be on the list and they aren’t already listed in the OPML file presently, leave them in the comments here and I’ll make sure they’re included.

In the mean time, for those who missed it, here are the two Mashable Conversations episodes regarding Austin. Make sure you subscribe to that podcast feed so you don’t miss any other episodes!

What's Wrong With Video?

Sean and I had a great discussion about online video, and what really grinds our gears over it, on yesterday’s Mashable Conversations.

Check it out. Discuss.