
Life Lessons from a Lifestyle Business: Interview with founder of Metafilter - tim_sw
https://medium.com/strong-words/a-lifestyle-business-can-kill-you-2e45add4107f#.y9m3egtzf
======
archildress
The stories he describes with the Google algorithm impacting his traffic (and
subsequently, bottom line) is pretty scary.

A rephrased quote from Matt Cutts on an algorithm change cutting MetaFilter's
traffic:

"Oh yeah, it never reversed. It should have. You were accidentally put in the
bad pile."

~~~
coderdude
I used to work for a company that sold furniture online. We were good but the
majority of our business came from the beloved serps. It hurt us dramatically
when our boilerplate product copy, sent to all online retailers, counted
against us as though we were spam. It was beyond my capabilities to develop a
method to automatically reword the copy. Surprise, surprise. We started to pay
people to write unique descriptions for the products that everyone on the net
was carrying. Then affiliates would pick it up and screw us again. That's it.
No happy ending. Company was bought by our most underhanded competitor. Now I
do my own thing.

I should note we rode the Google gravy train for about 8 years before that
happened. After "panda" the company couldnt afford to buy every bit of its
traffic. I doubt that's what Google was shooting for with that update but it
really changed some lives.

~~~
archildress
That's really an incredible story, and I doubt that it exists in a vacuum. I'd
really like to see a piece about companies like yours and others that were
impacted heavily by algorithm changes.

The part that probably bothers me the most is that if the MetaFilter founder
didn't have a direct connection to Matt Cutts, it probably would've just been
the end of his site at the scale he was at.

------
applecore
Not to be harsh, but this isn't a lifestyle business. It sounds like this guy
just wasn't the best choice to run the company.

Too much was spent on salaries and benefits. Only a month or two worth of cash
was kept in the company to handle expenses. Free cash flow was pulled out of
the company while it was still a viable growth opportunity. All the warning
signs were ignored despite a vast majority of their revenue coming from a
single source. Most egregiously, even though their traffic cratered after
Google's Panda update in November 2012, they didn't reach out to the head of
the web spam team at Google because... they didn't want to bother him.

Still, it's hard to admit mistakes. I have enormous respect for anyone willing
to share their experience like this.

~~~
sien
As et-al says he admits this himself.

But well, MeFi is more of a community than a company and as far as being a
community goes it's done about as well as anything on the web.

Matt has been great at keeping a community going.

Kuro5hin, Slashdot and many others have come and gone but MeFi keeps on going.

~~~
rsync
"Kuro5hin, Slashdot and many others have come and gone but MeFi keeps on
going."

Although I no longer use it, it does appear that slashdot is alive and well
...

~~~
rhizome
Alive, anyway.

~~~
zeemonkee3
It seems that some sites disappear into a black hole (such as Kuro5hin) and
some become dwarf stars (like Slashdot) - they're still burning, just not
giving off much heat or light.

------
slackstation
Two main takeaways here:

1\. Community doesn't scale well.

Reddit is a thimbleful of awesome floating in a bucket of shit. As I grow
older, the best communities and sources online are small. I love watching
youtube videos with less than a thousand views. My favorite sites and
communities online I share selectively. They are so easily ruined. The magic
is lost so easily (and by people who genuinely enthusiastic about things but,
aren't in the same mindset as the people already there).

2\. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die but,
he didn't and paid the price

Maybe it's just the internet changing but, he arguably should have just let it
die (or rather change into what Reddit eventually became). Metafilter,
SomethingAweful, 4Chan and Reddit all suffer from the reality of very few
people creating and the vast majority consuming.

~~~
joshmillard
> 2\. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die
> but, he didn't and paid the price

So, I'm a skosh biased, as the person currently running MetaFilter, with a
moderation staff that's managed to grow back to close to the pre-crisis status
quo, but I don't think that's really the best take on it.

With the benefit of hindsight, mostly what should have happened differently
and for the better was to take the downslide more seriously more quickly in
terms of changing our spending and saving and model for what the next year or
three years looked like, and to have gotten the community involved in that
discussion sooner. We'd likely be in more or less the same place we are today,
which is smaller but pretty steady and the community doing well, but with
fewer lurches and less pain and fumbling along the way.

I appreciate Matt's public frankness in this piece about some of the winging-
it nature of the site's business history and the missteps along the way,
because I know he's always tended to want to be more private or cautious about
that sort of thing. And I think the nature of MetaFilter as a tiny business
and a relatively close-knit community informs some of that dynamic; it's hard
enough for a business to break bad news to customers, but to folks who are
genuinely members of a community there's a whole other emotional commitment
involved.

~~~
dhimes
Do you run your own advertisements or do use only use Deck (or other third-
parties)?

~~~
joshmillard
It's a mix of things; Deck, AdSense (for all the trouble they're still a major
and these days fairly steady source of revenue), mostly-passive Amazon
affiliate, and direct support from the MetaFilter community.

We've looked at other ad rubrics and been disappointed with the specific
performance we've seen in a couple test cases, but the volatility of the ad
economy means that it's certainly something we'll be reexamining continuously
as time goes by.

------
chflags
In the late 1990's when they started, around the same time as Metafilter,
maybe Google was honestly trying to rank websites based on href's, as some
perceived indicator of website popularity.

But over time how much has Google itself influenced the product of its own
"Pagerank" algorithm?

If Google places a website as a first search result for some frequently
searched term(s), even if by accident, then that website is going to become
very popular, very quickly.

Opinion: Google determines the popularity of a website.

In the early days we believed they were presenting results based on the
relative popularity of websites. At some stage Google itself became the
determinant for the popularity of websites.

Stories like this one support this idea.

One could argue Google is running what amounts to an online version of the
Yellow Pages where the ads can be changed or rearranged hourly, daily, weekly,
etc. Instead of calling a telephone number to place an ad in the Yellow Pages,
one has to enter an opaque Adwords auction for words instead of ads.

But for the small business, especially those who do not bid on words, it gets
worse. A business listing in the search results will likely never been seen if
it is not in the top 10, i.e., on page 1.

Imagine if this were true for the Yellow Pages, which is organized
alphabetically. Businesses with names beginning with numbers or the letter "A"
would receive a grossly disproportionate share of calls, because no one would
ever get past the first page of listings.

As crazy as it sounds, I think there's an argument Google and not the user is
effectively doing the choosing. Whether it's intentional or not is irrelevant.
The way the system is implemented and used, this is the effect. And this only
benefits Google.

~~~
dalore
But don't Google also analyze how long you spent at a site when you click
results. So you click into a site, it's not what you wanted so you back out
and click another result. Google records that and sees that site wasn't useful
to you at that time for that search word. So it drops in popularity.

~~~
slig
I've always wondered if/how that works on power users that opens multiple
results on multiple tabs right after searching.

------
cmtyfndr
A little over a decade ago I founded a community driven website, after some
growth I started work on the site full time but discovered I wasn't the right
person to lead a business, induced by stress I sold the website on condition I
would remain in position. True to their word I remain in position to this day,
yet in the years since I've found that business interests and community
interests diverge and the community I am passionate about has suffered for
profit. I'm burned out, the community is my life, everything is connected,
skills, contacts, how do I move on? Matt found his future in writing, where do
I find my future?

~~~
zemotion
Quit and do things you like instead. You can always build new contacts,
skills, and connections. Once you burn out you are just dragging along, it's
painful and it's pointless.

I've been in three completely different fields for 3, 6, and 10 years
respectively. Once you find something you like, it's very easy to dig in and
build a new network and learn. Don't be afraid, be excited. The worst is when
you are doing something you feel dread for or don't want to get out of bed in
the morning for. Happy to talk/answer any questions.

------
curuinor
Some remarks on Mefi itself:

[http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24089/You-were-
accidentally-p...](http://metatalk.metafilter.com/24089/You-were-accidentally-
put-in-the-bad-pile)

------
mahranch
> it would have all the problems Reddit has: terrible people controlling the
> conversation.

I take serious offense to this. I am a moderator on reddit and the communities
I help out in are amazing. He paints all of reddit with the same brush but
reddit is too large for that -- it's now the 9th largest website in the U.S
according to Alexa. Sure, there are some horrible & trash communities. Perhaps
there's a lot of them, but there's also a lot of amazing subreddits run by
fantastic mods. Reddit is what you make of it - if you subscribe to those
shitty subreddits, then your experience will be shitty. If you subscribe to
great subreddits, then your experience will be equally great. Reddit is like a
snapshot of the internet as a whole; there's the bad, there's some meh, and
there's also some amazing content out there. You just have to look for it and
tailor your experience for those things.

If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My
reddit experience is great.

~~~
TarpitCarnivore
> If reddit is terrible, it's because you're not using reddit correctly. My
> reddit experience is great.

I think Matt's comment was more about the up vote/down vote and how it can be
controlled by a group of people.

As for your comment this is the common defense people turn to when defending
Reddit. While it's true, Reddit itself doesn't do a good job of showing you
how to use it. Logged out users see /r/all which more often than not is filled
with advice animals, pics, gifs and (right now) the_donald subs. It comes
across really poor. Even if you convert that user there is still not a ton of
guidance to finding relevant subs to your interest. There's so many splintered
subs (/r/game vs /r/games vs /r/truegaming) that it can be hard to find the
one meeting your needs. You can sub to them all, but then you have this
massive feed of subs. Some of which you may never see because your front page
is being overwhelmed by some of the more popular subs.

~~~
panic
Yeah, /r/all needs to die. The problem is finding and showing great stuff
while not flooding niche communities with new members. If you send tons of
people to /r/gaming, /r/gaming will stop being good, people will migrate to
/r/games, and the cycle will repeat. Any replacement for /r/all will have to
address this issue somehow.

~~~
cookiecaper
The system should be designed such that a flood of users _doesn 't_ degrade
the community's usefulness. It should be obvious that it's difficult to obtain
mass adoption if quality and readership are inversely correlated.

~~~
panic
It's not absolute readership that's the issue: it's a sudden growth in
readership. It takes time for people to learn community norms.

------
Mz
I read this article and followed the funding crisis when it happens because I
participate on Metafilter. I think the only serious mistake that Matt made (as
laid out in this article) that should have been obvious and avoidable was not
following up with Matt Cutts a whole lot sooner. In other words, he should
have given it like 6 to 12 weeks tops, then said "Hey, um, I am not seeing the
improvement you promised. When can I expect that by?" or something along those
lines.

Beyond that, all businesses that actually work at all are basically defying
long odds. A lot of things have to go right and it can be nigh impossible to
figure out what piece of it can be tweaked to improve performance and what
piece of it is a case of "Oh, my god, no, do not touch that! The entire thing
will crash if you change that one thing!" This is part of why franchises are
so popular.

------
rsync
I've been lurking on metafilter here and there for years.

I usually glance over it once daily after reading HN. I keep meaning to pay
the token fee and get a real username, etc.

But today, I saw a headline pre-pended with this:

"(WARNING: Contains strong language)"

... and that's the last straw.

I have come to expect the gratuitous (and common) "possibly NSFW links
somewhere in this page" or "warning: trigger alert: hurt feelings" on mefi,
but this was too much.

I'm sure I'll keep glancing over mefi from time to time, but I am not going to
invest in, or take part in, a community that is so infantile it needs markers
like "contains strong language".

~~~
joshmillard
The warning was quoted from the source, so your beef is with The Guardian.

MetaFilter has no shortage of strong language and it's not against any kind of
community guideline if it's not being used in an intentionally shitty way; as
a moderation staff we've pretty clearly set those expectations straight on the
rare occasions that someone has complained about sensibility-offending surfeit
of fucks and shits and damns in this or that conversation. I mostly just
expect it to be done with a degree of skill and thought.

The exception there is slurs and the like; there's strong language and then
there's racist/misogynist/homophobic/etc epithets, and the latter subclass is
a different beast entirely that in specific discussions of language can bear
mention rather than use when the distinction is clear. But that sort of thing
otherwise can, indeed, fuck right off.

------
yuhong
I remember that it was a long time before RWT's forums could be indexed by
Google.

