How Matt Haughey Beat Google

In 2002, Google launched one of their few pay services, Google Answers. The service attracted only 800 responders in the past 4 years, and was shut down a few weeks ago. Three years ago, Matt Haughey created Ask MetaFilter, pays no money to those who answer questions, and has turned the site into a successful part of his business using, in part, Google AdSense to support the site.

[T]he five dollar barrier for membership on all the MetaFilter sites acts as a just-high-enough barrier that it keeps random people on the web from asking drive-by questions that don't add value to the site. Five bucks out of your PayPal account is enough to really think if your question is worth asking.

There's also an existing community of tens of thousands of MetaFilter members which seeded the Ask MetaFilter site -- a strong and active base of early adopters. This is in contrast to a point Matt himself made while talking about the site:

"Google Answers is gone because Google isn't in the people business, they're in the computer programming business."

With the exception of Orkut and YouTube, Google doesn't really do community websites. That's not a criticism -- they get a lot of leverage out of having a smart python script do the work of hundreds of humans.