Why has Google forsaken MetaFilter?

By David Auerbach

Is Google broken? Or is your site broken? That’s the question any webmaster asks when she sees her Google click-throughs drop dramatically. It’s a question that Matt Haughey, founder of legendary Internet forum MetaFilter, has been asking himself for the last year and a half, as declining ad revenues have forced the long-running site to lay off several of its staff. MetaFilter, Haughey told me, made the bulk of its revenue through Google’s AdSense program. That is, MetaFilter worked with Google ad representatives to place advertising on its pages that was served by Google. In turn, most of MetaFilter’s visitors came via Google searches. (MetaFilter’s members pay a small one-time signup fee to see no advertising; I am a member but not a terribly active one. I should also disclose here that I used to work for Google and my wife still does.)

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Continua qui: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/metafilter_layoffs_why_has_google_forsaken_the_legendary_internet_forum.html