At Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis's Dim Sum 2.0 dinner in New York a couple weeks back, I was just within earshot when Calacanis told someone nearby that Mahalo was already profitable. A pleasant surprise, he said. Later, I asked him directly if Mahalo was profitable. "Not yet," he told me. Now a tipster tells us Mahalo isn't even close — with 4 million unique visitors a month on 8 million pageviews, the site's monthly gross is $9,000.

Calacanis is likely to dismiss the revenue figures with some handwaving about "ramping up sales." Let's look at the traffic figures instead: When a visitor generates an average of two pageviews a month, that tells you Mahalo's not a destination for anyone. It's a search-engine optimization play, exactly the kind of "spam" operation Calacanis has railed against.

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