> 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.
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.
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.