Did Google Relax Rules for Mahalo To Join Premium Adsense Club

Mahalo is now a premium Adsense publisher meaning they get permission from Google to display custom Ad formats on their web pages among other benefits.

Related: Premium Adsense publisher privileges

Normally, Google invites only those websites to the Adsense Premium club that average more more than 20 million page views a month. If Mahalo has managed to cross that number in such a short span of time, hats off to Jason Calacanis.

There are, however, some doubts. For instance, TechCrunch of Michael Arrington averages around 4 million page views a month and he is no Premium Adsense Publisher. Same holds good for Pete Cashmore of Mashable though he gets even more traffic that TechCrunch.

   

Is Mahalo getting 4x the monthly traffic of Mashable or TechCrunch? While Mahalo web stats are not public, the Alexa and Compete graphs paint a very different picture (click to enlarge)

As per Alexa or Compete, Mahalo may not be anywhere near the "20 million a month" - that make one wonder what made Google present them the Adsense Premium Crown? Did Google relax the minimum qualification criteria for Adsense or is Mahalo really getting that high traffic? If yes, maybe it's time for us to stop referring to Alexa and Compete altogether.