Give Me the Low-Down on Putting Together a Meta Site

July 30, 2008 7:05 AM

What are the components that make a successful Meta site?

I'd like to start a new venture that would be similar to Meta in some ways - in that people may ask questions and inquire the hive mind - but these questions are all relative to one subject.

Is the word Meta copyrighted or can anyone use it?

What is needed to get started? What kind of programming knowledge and skills are needed? I'd like to charge people a nominal fee for signing up as well. So what's involved in that? And as for publicity - do I dare ask how to start a campaign? Would you let it take on a life of its own or to do it virally and unabashedly all out focused?

In short, I need the low-down of starting a meta site devoted to one subject and how to make it a phenomenal success.

posted by watercarrier to computers & internet (15 comments total)

Your chances of any website start up having more than 3 readers/week after 6 months of online are less than 1%. Hope this helps.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 7:12 AM on July 30

IAN(Yet)AL. "Meta", at least as it relates to websites, cannot be trademarked on its own as it is already in common use all over the internet and tends to be a solely descriptive term. By contrast, "MetaFilter" is reasonably unique, not solely descriptive, and would be eligible for trademark and may already be registered.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:16 AM on July 30

In short, I need the low-down of starting a meta site devoted to one subject and how to make it a phenomenal success.

First thing you need to do is define what you mean by success. Does it mean making ton of money? Does it mean having a warm feeling inside you? This is critical, because if you get into this thinking X, when you really want Y, well, you've just wanted time and potentially money.


The second thing you need to do is define what kind of budget you have to accomplish that.

The third thing you need to do is figure out what you personally are going to bring to the table. Are you a people person, but have no programming skills? Well, then you need to figure who to either do the programming yourself or convince people to do it for you.

What is needed to get started? What kind of programming knowledge and skills are needed? I'd like to charge people a nominal fee for signing up as well. So what's involved in that? And as for publicity - do I dare ask how to start a campaign? Would you let it take on a life of its own or to do it virally and unabashedly all out focused?

If you're doing it all yourself you need to know how to design a good looking site and write HTML and CSS that can show up in a variety of browsers. Knowing some PHP and mySQL would help a lot.

If you're going to charge people, you need some way of securely collecting their info and money, probably through Paypal. Also, are you going to have something worth charging for? After all, I can go on Askme or Yahoo Answers for $5 or free, so why pay you anything?

What sort of features is the site going to have? For example, will users be able to favorite comments? If they favorite comments, will they be able to see what they've favorited? if they can see it, can they file or categorize the favorities anyway they want? Can they have unlimited favorities? How many things can they favorite in a day? What if users want to favorite other things, like the actual posts or even other users, will they be able to do that? You gotta think of some of these things and buy or develop software that will allow that.

Basically define what you want, why you want it, what you expect to get out of it and then how you're going to do it.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:46 AM on July 30

I don't believe anyone would understand what you are talking about if you described it as "a meta site," nor is asking questions the original or sole purpose of this site with "meta" in the name.

What you are talking about I have most usually seen called a "Q&A site."
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:14 AM on July 30

What makes Ask successful is the community, period. In that it's large, participatory and smarter than average.

It seems to me that mathowie got this community together by getting in early, being part of a geeky community, and practicing a lot of judicious but generally restrained (if occasionally controversial) moderation. People feel proprietary about Metafilter, which creates a climate that no amount of site design can achieve. If I see someone being a jerk in an Ask thread I feel personally offended, which may be stupid but it clearly happens enough that most egregious jerkery gets flagged and slagged quickly.

I participated in a friend's attempt to get a question site with a specific focus off the ground and it was an uphill battle for him that ultimately failed. The basic problems seemed to be not enough people in the community to keep it active and not much quality control - he didn't really want the job of moderating a forum.

Actually I wonder if AskMe is the best example to be considering. What makes this place special is the diversity of knowledge represented in the membership. You've got a reasonable chance with a really wide variety of topics of getting some intelligent, informed response. You don't want that: you want to attract a community with a lot of knowledge in a specific area, which suggests a different community development and promotion strategy. Maybe people could really help you by suggesting effective topic-specific forums they know of that you could study - if their topic is non-competing with yours you might even find founders or moderators in some of these forums who would let you pick their brains.

In the end it looks like to me all such forums are plagued by the chicken and egg problem, i.e. how do you attract a big enough community to produce a forum of sufficiently high quality to attract a big enough community to... Paying mind to the obvious issues of good site design, persistence, expecting it to take a good long time, being willing to do a lot of personal heavy lifting on community management, finding ways to reward early adopters and active/helpful participants are strategies that come to mind, but I'm guessing it's a very non-trivial problem whose answers depend a lot on the specific topic the community forms around.
posted by nanojath at 8:35 AM on July 30

Remember that MeFi was free for years. It's virtually impossible to get users to a new site and charge them for it. It's more like you pay them.
posted by smackfu at 8:36 AM on July 30

There are several shareware programs out there that will generate Metafilter-like sites. Note sure if you can use them to make money though. Check the Mefi Wiki.
posted by xammerboy at 9:20 AM on July 30

I get the impression (like others here) that you're talking specifically about AskMefi and not Metafilter in general -- is that right?

Here is a list of some other question-and-answer web sites that may give you an idea of what else is out there along the lines of Q&A sites. (The ones that I've looked at tend to have a very high noise-to-value ratio, to wit, How is Babby Formed.)

As far as what kind of programming skills you need, there are any number of different tools that could be used to build a site like this. In addition to the standard web languages of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, you could theoretically use any scripting language plus database system to build the site. MeFi sites use ColdFusion, I think, but the implementation is not inherent in the tools. PHP, .Net, Ruby on Rails, Perl, etc. would work. In essence, all of these sites are just specific iterations of content management systems -- you could possibly even use a preexisting CMS or forum software depending on what specific functionality you want.

I would suggest that before you worry too much about figuring out how to promote the site and charge users, building the site is the priority. No matter how well mapped out your business model is, it will fail if the site doesn't work or is too difficult to use.

After that, attracting users, with or without charging them a fee, is going to be a difficult step for this kind of project because the value of a Q&A site arises from the "hivemind" that it can draw on. Until the userbase is sufficiently large and diverse, the number and quality of answers is likely to be low, so it's unlikely that people are going to see it as a useful resource.

In MetaFilter's case, the userbase existed as an audience of the main site before AskMeFi was created (it came ~4 years after MetaFilter ad the site had thousands of users). A few of those sites listed in the first link trade on existing brands (Yahoo, About.com, Amazon). Without an existing group of users or a well-known brand to leverage, building the userbase for something that depends on community participation is going to be difficult and would, I think, rely on recruiting a strong core of dedicated answerers who were experts in whatever niche you envision the site.
posted by camcgee at 9:21 AM on July 30

Also, I'm not sure "meta" means what you think it might mean. "Meta" means 'referring to one's self or the conventions of its genre.'

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why MetaFilter is called "MetaFilter," it just doesn't make any sense. Am I missing something?
posted by InsanePenguin at 9:53 AM on July 30

Is the word Meta copyrighted ... ?

No. It's not a proper noun. It's a plain English word, derived from Greek. But it actually means something; you should make sure you understand that meaning before you use it in your name. The Wikipedia entries for meta and metadata are good starting points.

What is needed to get started?

A domain name, web hosting, and computer hacking skills.

What kind of programming knowledge and skills are needed?

More than you have, or are likely to acquire anytime soon, if you have to ask that question.

I'd like to charge people a nominal fee for signing up as well. So what's involved in that?

PayPal probably offers the easiest route; they offer a variety of shopping carts and donation buttons and suchlike for hobbyist/mom-&-pop sites. For a higher degree of professionalism, you'd want to get an account with a card processor such as authenticate.net.

And as for publicity—do I dare ask how to start a campaign?

It seems that you do.

Would you let it take on a life of its own or to do it virally and unabashedly all out focused?

That all depends on what you're doing. If you have capital, and it makes sense given the nature of the site, a marketing budget might make sense. But some carefully targeted online advertising is probably a lot more practical (and certainly less annoying) than any kind of viral stunt.
posted by greenie2600 at 10:01 AM on July 30

Oh yeah, and smackfu is right—getting someone to pay for a web site is damn near impossible. People are very used to everything on the web being free. The only reason MetaFilter can get away with it is because they've spent years painstakingly building and cultivating one of the best sites (and communities) on the web. You have a very long road to hoe before your site will be that valuable to anyone.
posted by greenie2600 at 10:06 AM on July 30

Matt is pretty helpful about how to run a profitable site. Check out fortuitous.
posted by theora55 at 10:52 AM on July 30

I hit post too soon. You need to do way more research. Metafilter's pal sites might be a good example: metachat, sportsfilter, monkeyfilter. Ad support is the recommended way to make money. You have to generate good content for ads to be successful.
posted by theora55 at 12:04 PM on July 30

If they favorite comments, will they be able to see what they've favorited? if they can see it, can they file or categorize the favorities anyway they want?

I don't believe we can do that on AskMeFi. Am I right? I would really like it if we could, so I'd recommend that feature for your new site.
posted by JimN2TAW at 12:42 PM on July 30

No, we can't do that on AskMeFi.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:06 PM on July 30