Q&A with MetaFilter.com founder Matt Haughey. As Wikipedia defines it, MetaFilter is a community weblog whose purpose is to share links and discuss interesting content that users have discovered on the web. From personal use I know that Ask.MetaFilter.com is one of the most useful sites anywhere for “querying the hive mind”. Enjoy!

RI -“MetaFilter is one of the oldest (1999) online social sites. What keeps it going where others fail? (Author’s note, I think of mefi a as social site but only in the broadest of terms. Or rather, it’s become more social over the years (the first few years, there wasn’t all that much discussion on the posts, now the most popular posts have hundreds of comments)…”

MH -It has consistently grown ever since early 2000, when I think it hit enough of a critical mass to be interesting. As to why it keeps going – it probably has something to do with it being what it is first and foremost. When I think of other online social sites that come and go, they’re largely offshoots of some other service that didn’t fit quite right. MetaFilter has always kind of been its own thing and has stayed interesting enough to attract interesting people that continue to contribute to it everyday.

RI -“With all your other projects, (PVRblog, fortuito.us, NYT Circuits, etc…) do you run MetaFilter as your main business or a side project at this point?”

MH -MetaFilter definitely takes up most of my attention and time, and everything else is a side-project. In case it’s not clear, MetaFilter is run as a real business and has three full-time employees as well as myself working full time on it. There is a tremendous amount of moderation and upkeep to do as well as more than enough programming work to keep us all busy.

RI -“What is your favorite thing about MetaFilter?”

MH -I guess I’d have to say my favorite thing is the real-world aspects of it. People post interesting links and comment on them at the main MetaFilter blog and they help each other out at Ask MetaFilter, but aside from the standard online community where there is a set of recognizable usernames there’s an entire offline component where people are meeting up at bars and social events around the world on a nearly daily basis. Most Friday and Saturday nights have meetups planned for several locations around the globe. From those casual events, members of the site form some pretty meaningful and lasting bonds with the site and each other (as evidenced by the dozen or so marriages between members). I didn’t really intentionally gear the site towards these sorts of offline connections, but they’ve happened and continue to happen and it’s pretty cool.

RI - “Is the economy affecting your revenue stream? Ads, subscribers, donations (via Amazon?)”

MH -So far there hasn’t been much of a negative effect. The election drove a lot of traffic and advertising and during the days with the biggest loses on Wall Street I was seeing the highest traffic ever and ad revenue growth. Christmas is always pretty good so things have stayed at high levels, but I am bracing for a 20-30% slowdown over the next year. I have a feeling that while the ad industry will definitely see the effects of a downturn economy, I’m fairly confident online advertising and systems like Google’s Adwords/Adsense system in particular will be healthy and may continue to grow, since they offer advertisers comprehensive metrics on every campaign. I can imagine if you were say, a large auto manufacturer and wanted to advertise your new line of cars, placing ads in newspapers or on the radio would bevery hard to track and could be seen as a large waste of money, but at least with online ads, you can track every dollar, every click, and every lead, so it’s very effective and I bet will be one of the last areas of advertising to feel a hit.

RI -“What’s your take on the collapse of the newspaper industry? Do you have an opinion on it?”

MH -It’s a sad state of affairs, but I think it’s mostly due to the slow movement of the industry. Frankly, MetaFilter likely exists and thrives because newspapers were so slow to get online and since going online have been hostile to readers (”you must register to read this article”) and slow to adapt in a changing world. A friend upon seeing MetaFilter for the first time in the year 2000 said “this is great, you’re basically the comment engine for sites like CNN and the New York Times.” Though news from newspapers makes up a small aspect of MetaFilter, it is kind of true that a lot of people on the site enjoy the community and the discussions and often want to know what other members of the community think of a recent news piece.

Newspapers are starting to have comment sections, but they have no community. There’s a huge difference and it’s up to them to figure it out and figure out why that is so important.

RI -“Do you read newspapers? If so, in what format (print, online) and why?”

MH -I don’t read printed newspapers. I tried subscribing to one in grad school and being a busy student, they just ended up in giant piles so I eventually gave up on them. I don’t read front pages of newspapers online – it’s the least interesting thing and the hardest place to find something worth reading. I generally read at least a couple dozen articles daily though, mostly pointed out by my social circle (people who blog that I follow, twitter users I trust, friends sharing things in Google Reader). Friends are an amazing social filter and the social filter is essentially replicating the water cooler online. If I ran into any number of friends face to face on any given day, we’d probably mention the articles (”Hey, did you see the new Michael Pollan piece in the NYT about the future of food policy?”) but we’ve found a way to do that online instead.

RI -“What was it like to take what was sort of a labor of love and actually monetize it, so to speak, with ads and whatnot. You actually employ people now, which blows my mind.”

MH -It’s fantastic and I am constantly reminded of how great it is to figure out how to make a labor of love turn into a business, then a company. It definitely builds pressure and stress and makes things way more complicated. When I first hired people I could barely sleep at night knowing if I screwed up, I was going to be messing up not just my own family, but other families as well.

RI -“Have newspaper started approaching you to get your “expert” opinion about the web and blogging etc-how was that experience?”

MH -Yeah, I spoke at a Midwestern Poynter Institute conference a couple years ago. The talk went over well, especially with younger members of the audience. After my talk, I heard a lot of young reporters and people that worked in editing say the lessons from blogging and online community building was exactly what they needed at their own paper, but they were often prevented from trying anything interesting by higher ups that didn’t see blogs or community building as important to the newspaper.

RI -“What does it signify that newspapers/old-skool media in general are still kind of unfamiliar with how the online world/social networking/etc works?”

MH -I guess it signifies that they are behind the times. It shouldn’t be such an obvious generation gap kind of thing, but it mostly seems to be the case.

RI -“What’s you opinion about papers using twitter et al?”

MH -Honestly, I haven’t noticed much beyond the New York Times being an early user of it. They just used it to blast article titles and links into twitter and I suppose some people find that useful, but I don’t.

RI -With the slow down of advertising (and payment terms of most advertising networks, except Google of course) how are you adjusting your business strategy

MH -I haven’t done much beyond try to lessen by bottom line spending (lowering my web hosting bills). If things get tight, I may launch more sub-sites within MetaFilter, or launch additional ventures like last summer’s Fuelly.com social app.

RI - What is your customer relation strategy or level of customer service? Would it be different if it were free? I ask this in regards the level of expectation of your subscriber base that paid, as oppose to your users that are more often than not use to free services

MH -Customer service is totally and completely key to running the site. I realized soon after I launched the $5 paywall to participation that people expected more, so I delivered it. I’ve now got two full time people in addition to myself answering emails and fixing problems for any user that asks, 24hrs a day. Most problems are solved within minutes. We also have an entire feedback area of the site where users can discuss feature requests or point out problems and we do our best to all answer in that forum as well.

I’ve always been attentive to users on the site, but in the last couple years I’ve seen companies embrace good customer service and I’ve realized from using those sorts of companies that I enjoy them immensely more when they can solve my problems and do it in a timely manner, so I’ve gone to great lengths to continue doing that no matter how big the site gets.

RI -Has your barrier to entry (payment) been effective in reducing noise and promoting quality?

MH -Oh yeah, most definitely. The $5 one-time fee to participate (beyond reading for free) isn’t really part of any business model. It doesn’t bring in enough revenue to even cover hosting costs, but it lessens the load on myself and the other moderators, it virtually rids the site of drive-by fly-by-night spammers, and it helps make sure people really, really want to be there. It’s an extremely high barrier to entry and I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it unless they already have a large vibrant community that would even make the fee worth paying. I tried a lot of different ways of throttling signups to keep them at a manageable level. I tried only 10 new users a day starting at a specific time, I tried turning off the new user signup page randomly, but the most fair and best way to keep signups as a manageable level so far has been the fee.

-Matt

My thanks to Matt for taking the time to answer some questions here on MetaPrinter (no relation). If you don’t already visit and contribute to MetaFilter, I recommend you check it out. In my opinion it is one of the best online communities. For the sake of full disclosure I’ve had a $5 lifetime account with MetaFilter for several years now and consider it my best investment to date.

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