State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions

THE SHORT VERSION

Right now, because of recent steep drops in ad revenue, we're running at an $8,000/month deficit. I'm bringing this to you all now because we need to fix that shortfall soon to avoid significant cuts to our current payroll levels. We're still operating as normal right now thanks to the cushion members built up last fall, and that and conservative budgeting have worked as intended: it's given us a few more months of leeway to work on the problem, so we can consider our options and make smart, non-panicky decisions. But we need to get to work on it ASAP.

First, we're cutting spending further in the limited places we can, to buy a little more time.

Second, we're looking at ways to increase revenue. We're open to ideas in addition to this, but a core part of our plan here is moving to a more sustainable community-funded model, where we rely more on members and supporters to fund the operation of the site and less on the whims of the ad market. We never want anyone to be turned away from Metafilter for money reasons, and that's going to remain a firm commitment in whatever system we settle on. But for those who can afford it, we're considering moving toward a formal subscription model, where we'd try to meet our budget needs through a more explicit focus on monthly subscriptions. This place costs money to run, and the more that money comes from people who care about the site rather than disinterested corporate third parties, the better off we'll all be.

Some details:

- We are, specifically, running about $8,000 a month short of an operating budget of about $38,000 a month.
- This is a new problem as of this year and specifically the last few months.
- At the start of 2018, we were breaking even, but there's been a significant decline in Adsense revenue the last few months.
- We've also been affected by Amazon's reduction in affiliate program payouts starting around the middle of last year.
- At our current rate of loss, we have enough in savings to bear us through the next four months or so with no change to spending.
- After that we'll hit a critical point where cutting the budget by $8K/mo will be necessary to keep a minimum safe amount in savings month to month.
- Almost all of our budget goes to payroll, and cuts would have to come out of that, which means pay cuts and/or laying moderators off.
- Our two obvious paths to reducing or eliminating that budget shortfall are (1) new ad revenue and (2) new recurring contributions from members and supporters of the site.

I am working on the ad revenue aspect, and will talk more about that more in the future. We're also looking as a team at what we can manage for immediate small-scale, hopefully temporary, reductions in pay to slow the approach of that critical major-cuts point.

But the community funding part we can address right now, so I'll lay it out here:

If you can afford to help support MetaFilter with a recurring contribution, we need that help now.

If you already support MeFi but can afford to up that a little, we need that help now.

Every extra five or ten or twenty dollars a month, every quarterly or yearly or one-time contribution, will help.

I can never thank the MetaFilter community sufficiently for the finanical support you've already provided over the years. It has been decisive in keeping this place stable in the years since the big financial crises and layoffs back in 2014. It's become clearer over time that the stability and closely-connected nature of community funding is workable for community-centric projects in a way that can't be likewise said for disinterested ad income; expanding that support right now will be decisive in helping us avert a new looming staffing crisis and stabilizing our long-term funding model.

I'm 100% committed to keeping MetaFilter around and operating as a good place to be on the internet. I will make sure that happens one way or the other. But I also want very badly to continue to provide the MeFi staff with the jobs they have been so giving in and dedicated to over the years, and to provide the MetaFilter community with the level of attention and stewardship their work makes possible. If you can help there, that would mean a great deal to me and to the team.

THE LONG VERSION

Okay, buckle up. I'll break down our current revenue and our current expenses, talk about site activity and engagement, and lay out some short-term and long-term goals related to everything going on with the site. While we've talked about bits and pieces of this in MetaTalk in the interim, this is substantially a followup to the change of ownership announcement back at the end of July last year.

REVENUE

We currently have three major revenue sources:

1. Google Adsense ad units running on the bulk of the threads on Ask MeFi and on MetaFilter proper, for logged-out users.
2. Amazon affiliate program income from folks reaching Amazon via affiliate-coded links in comments and from members using our link when shopping.
3. Direct user contributions, via PayPal and Stripe and in a few cases paper check.

Adsense and Amazon income are down. Adsense in particular, by a lot since the beginning of the year. Direct contributions have been steady and I'm ridiculously thankful for that.

Details on those revenue streams:

1. Our Adsense income has shown a signficant decline since the start of 2018. This looks to be a combination of lower CPM/RPM rates overall -- that is, fewer clicks per thousand ads shown and/or less money per ad actually clicked -- and somewhat lower total number of ads being served in the first place. It's difficult to reduce this to a single explanatory factor; increased ad blocking, decreased advertising demand, lower levels of search traffic from some Google adjustment, and a lower total number of ad-serving threads to begin with because of Google content filtering rules may all be contributing factors. I'm trying to better prise those apart to see what we can address and how on each front.

But the overall effect is significant: the change in Adsense revenue from the January to May accounts for basically the entirety of our current budget shortfall.

In the last month, that revenue hasn't dropped further, and it's possible it will stabilize or even recover somewhat; Adsense has always been somewhat variable for us, and swung around significantly in 2017 as well, though in an up-and-down fashion rather than the current down-and-down-some-more way. But the current situation is precarious and there's no specific reason to believe it will improve, so I'm planning for the scenario where it doesn't.

Right now, Adsense represents on the order of $17,000 a month.

2. Amazon's affiliate program changed its rates in mid-2017; as a result, we are now making several thousand dollars less each month from that program than we had in the few years prior. That lower rate has looked fairly stable the last several months as the new normal. The loss of income in 2017 wasn't greatly worrying because Adsense was performing well enough. In the current situation, that extra few thousand dollars would make a big difference, but it's not something over which we have any control.

I don't expect Amazon's affiliate rates to decrease again soon, but in practice our revenue from that program is tied in part to our level of search traffic, just like our Adsense revenue is: if fewer people arrive at the site to click a link, fewer people will end up generating sales credit for MeFi. So long-term drops in traffic to the site from changes in Google's search decisions could eat at this revenue, which is something I'll be monitoring.

Right now, Amazon represents on the order of $5,000 a month.

3. Direct financial support from users and lurkers has been solid and consistent over the last 18 months. Even as we've seen revenue decreases elsewhere, y'all have been very steady in your continuing support, and goddam do I appreciate that. And when I announced the change of ownership of the site and the need to do some fundraising last July, folks dug in extra and provided about ten thousand dollars in one-time donations along with a small bump in the rate of recurring donations.

All in all direct support has been by far the most reliable stream of revenue the last few years and I find that incredibly heartening; it also leaves me with very complicated feelings about asking for more because I understand that that steadiness to some extent just represents what people are collectively comfortable with contributing.

But it's also a level of support that has corresponded to a period of relatively stability and mild financial recovery for the site. And it has declined, if very shallowly, over time, down from a high of around $9,000 a month back when the old financial crisis played out. And it has slid like that in part I imagine (and understandably so!) because of the site's stability; things have been keeping steadily along for a few years now, and folks have this or that come up and need to trim back or pause monthly donations, etc.

What it comes down to is: I don't look at these financial contributions lightly or take them for granted. It's an incredible string of generosity from the MetaFilter community. So I wouldn't ask for more if we didn't need it, and to whatever extent that folks *can* afford to do a little more without putting themselves in any kind of duress, now is when increasing that support level would really, really matter. And in the long-run, this may be the model we need to focus most on; we'll be looking at how to support and develop that going forward.

It's also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, okay if contributing or contributing more is not personally doable for you; nobody should feel they need to pay to be a part of this place, and everybody's financial situation is different.

But for those it is workable for, finding that extra little bit to help us with, finding a way to put another however much a month toward this place to help it remain stable long-term, would matter a lot.

Right now, direct financial contributions represent about $7,500 a month.

EXPENSES

Our fixed monthly expenses are about $37,500 a month. Almost all of that is payroll; we spend about $2000 a month on non-payroll expenses.

Payroll covers all costs for the seven folks on staff (me, LobsterMitten, restless_nomad, taz, goodnewsfortheinsane, Eyebrows McGee, and our technomancer frimble), which includes both full-time and part-time schedules, insurance benefits where possible, site development and maintenance work, and administrative fees from our small business HR services provider.

Non-payroll consists mostly of hosting costs on AWS; there's also couple hundred dollars a month for employee phone/data service for moderating from mobile devices or emergency data tethering during residential internet service outages, and another couple hundred in miscellaneous recurring fees and subscriptions for our site infrastructure, API services we depend on, etc.

There's very little flexibility in the non-payroll section of the budget -- MeFi just needs a certain amount of hosting infrastructure by definition -- though I am working with some folks at Amazon to try and trim a little off our AWS bill if possible.

Payroll is where we're able to make signficant cuts if it comes to that, but obviously that's a hard thing to have to do. We're currently looking at where things can give a little in what folks are getting paid, hopefully only temporarily, without any actual staffing changes. But to cover a gulf of $8,000 a month we'd have to pay for fundamentally less moderation every month.

And avoiding cutting back on moderation matters to me for two different reasons. One, MetaFilter works best when moderation can happen 24/7, when we're able to respond promptly all day every day to the kinds of questions and issues that arrive in a free-form community space. Two, I care a great deal about these folks I work with and want to provide them with the reliable employment that they deserve in exchange for their dedication to this community.

We also have incidental expenses, for things like employee equipment replacement or yearly renewals/fees and for fill-in staffing when scheduling requires it, or fees for legal or financial advice and services. These don't average out to a lot month to month -- maybe $500/mo, maybe less -- but they're there and the possibility of a large incidental expense is part of why it's important to me that we maintain some level of savings in the bank beyond just bare minimum monthly expenses.

Being tight on budget also means that we have to look much closer at whether and when to pay for extra fill-in hours (e.g. Eyebrows working extra hours beyond her normal weekend coverage, or Jessamyn doing a week of temporary modding), vs. just rearranging our basic scheduled shifts to trade off an overbooked week here for some vacation time there and vice versa. It's an expense we can avoid but it makes things more difficult and increases burnout risks.

To sum up: I'm looking at where we can recover a sliver of our non-payroll expenses, and where we can minimize incidentals; there's not much room to move there, though, and while we're gonna do a little belt-tightening right away on our monthly payroll to make our savings last longer, I'll have to look at some kind of staffing cuts by or before the end of the year to stabilize site finances if we can't improve our revenue situation.

COMMUNITY STUFF

Revenue woes aside, MetaFilter's been kicking along as the community I know and care about, and I'm thankful every day that it's here and that you're all here. This has been and remains the place I want more of the internet to be like.

It's been a hard couple of years out in the world and that's come out in how folks are feeling on the site, what they're posting about and commenting about, how their worries and their burdens inform the kinds of interactions they have here. Some of it has been pretty trying, and tiring for users and mods alike.

But there's also been a lot of good, and a lot of that comes down to people actively pushing for good stuff on the site, which I really appreciate. Sometimes that's meant carving out dedicated spaces for venting or political grar in an effort to keep that stuff from spilling out elsewhere on the site; other times, it's folks deciding to post positive stuff on the front page, or to foster fun or fascinating discussions on MetaTalk, or to organize activities like card exchanges or group games. And y'all have been finding ways to just support each other, to be there in the face of the hard stuff.

And folks have continued to do the sorts of useful, engaging things that make MetaTalk an important part of this place: reporting site issues, proposing tweaks, requesting this or that pony, celebrating milestones and saying goodbye to folks we've lost, and bringing complicated or discouraging site discussion issues to the community to try and work through. MeFi's, and MeFites', willingness to try and make self-examination and growth as an empathetic community an ongoing goal is something really valuable for the health of this place, and really important to me in how I see this place.

I think we're continuing to struggle to find a good balance for the outsized impact of the current clusterfuck of the US administration and the broader regressive elements of the geopolitical situation, but the times are what they are and I appreciate the degree to which folks on the site have shared in making some of that effort to balance things. I'm also hugely appreciative to the moderation team for sticking with this weird shambling attempt to find a throughline under such difficult prevailing conditions.

But all in all, I feel good about where MetaFilter is at as a community, notwithstanding the state of the world. This is my home online, and the same is true for a whole lot of you, and I'm glad for that.

SITE ENGAGEMENT

One thing that's been a point of concern over time is the idea of ongoing decline in MetaFilter's overall activity level. There's no question that overall daily activity has declined over time, particularly since the peak years around 2008-10. Ultimately I think that as a community MetaFilter can tolerate a pretty wide range of activity, and so a quieter site on average isn't inherently a problem.

That said, giving new folks reasons to join up, and existing members positive or interesting or fun stuff to engage with, is a good goal for such a long-running site, and there's a number of things that the MeFi team has been looking at in service of that.

Part of that is just encouraging everybody to find the things you like about the site and do them, support them, contribute to them, and I'd like to continue to find ways to do that. Several folks have made a particular effort to do so in the last while, in posts and site activities, and that's been great. We also have traditions that have fallen by the wayside over the years that I'd like to get back to more, things like organized MeFi Music album collaborations and a more visible and actively supported meetup/IRL culture on the site. I hope y'all will help us push to make those fun things happen.

Part of it is looking at what is and isn't working on the site for potential new users. There's a lot of possibilities here: some we've talked about before, like revamping FanFare to be more broadly accessible or reworking the signup documentation to be a little more modern and explanatory of contemporary MetaFilter in the context of a contemporary internet; some are more experimental, like reworking the signup process itself, or tweaking/expanding the content of the logged-out front page of MetaFilter to make it clearer to new readers and passersby the wealth and variety of interesting stuff that's lurking under our old-school reverse-chrono text interface. I'll be working through those ideas with the team and talking with the site about any developments or experiments on that front.

As a goal, I think a moderately increased rate of new users signups would be good for the site. I would not want to fundamentally change the pace or feel of new signups because I think MeFi has always benefited from bringing folks onboard through a slow-and-steady process of acclimation and modeling good behavior, but if we went from a small handful of new users every day to a medium-sized handful that'd be a positive, manageable change.

But a thing worth noting: our non-user revenue is tied to external search traffic in a way that, for better and for worse, has always been oddly disconnected from what's happening in the MetaFilter community itself. Measureably declining user activity doesn't necessarily, and hasn't historically, tracked closely with our search-based traffic revenue; the flip side of that is that increased user activity wouldn't by any account necessarily lead to an increase in search-based revenue. So I see the idea of bringing new users in and keeping existing members engaged more as a good in itself than as a solution to Adsense or Amazon revenue problems.

WHAT'S NEXT

There's a lot to think about and a lot of ideas to work through here. I've got a laundry list of things I'm working on or planning to work on, but as usual we're also interested in what all of you in the community are thinking. If you have ideas, suggestions, etc. we're all ears, so please let us know.

Our financial shortfall is clearly the most pressing issue. I'm going to be heavily focused on that right now, to try and contain the problem as much as possible. That means the push for new direct support and the belt-tightening stuff I talked about above; that also means looking at new revenue possibilities, which includes potential new/different ad approaches, new third-party ad partners, exploring a more externally-facing fundraising approach to supplement direct support from within the MeFi community, and so on. I'm incredibly averse to burying MeFi under crap in order to save it, but I think there's lower-impact possibilities worth giving a closer look. I'll keep you all posted about any changes or proposals there as they come together.

The site's 19th birthday is coming up, July 14th; next year it'll be the big Twenty. This feels like a tricky time to talk about plans for throwing any sort of big shindig, but I think anniversaries of shared spaces and shared experiences are good things, so I'd love folks to think about having a local meetup this year in the vicinity of the birthday. Maybe you haven't had one in your town in a while; here's a good excuse to get back on the horse. Maybe you throw 'em all the time and it'll be a cinch. Maybe you live in a MeFite desert and we can have a long-distance meetup in MetaTalk with y'all. But it's good to get together, and good to see each others faces sometimes. And in the long run, I'll think about what we might be able to pull off in 2019, even if only with shoestrings and paper plates and a few freshly scanned cats.

This is a lot of words and a lot of it has been kinda heavy. We're in a bind financially, and it's frankly a pretty scary situation to be resonsible for navigating and I really don't know how it's going to play out. But.

But MetaFilter's value as a place, as an idea, as an example of what is possible on an often troubled and toxic internet, is something more durable than its specific business circumstances. This is a community that matters, to me and to you and to so many people over the years. Whatever else happens, I believe in MetaFilter, and in all of you who make it what it is. I believe in that come storm or sun, and I'm glad you're all here with me as we make our way forward.