For exactly two years - between 20 - MetaFilter was a real company able to provide its six employees with dental coverage thanks to small contributions from its 62,000 members and Google-powered advertising. One well-known example of this model is MetaFilter, a 17-year-old web community known for being a rare bastion of kindness, as well as thoughtful commentary about news articles. That’s enough to cover the site’s costs, plus rent for its three employees, and since those supporters are committing to monthly contributions, it has the whiff of sustainability. Hype Machine is up to 2,678 supporters as of this writing, with the average donation around $5. Luckily for him, the campaign is going well. If they fell too far short, they would have to take on second jobs, but they would continue running Hype Machine part time. If they fell a couple hundred short, they could still keep running Hype Machine full time, although it would potentially be uncomfortable. Volodkin calculated that if they got 3,000 monthly supporters, they could keep running Hype Machine full time. The trio launched a crowdfunding campaign on May 5, asking supporters to contribute monthly. “I just think a service like this is super important to have on the internet and I’m really interested in finding any way possible to have it continue,” he said. Volodkin was completely opposed to giving up. “.You don’t need to be Snapchat, you don’t need to be Instagram, you don’t need to be huge to have a product that people can love.” - Zoya Feldman, Hype Machine Volodkin, Feldman, and Hype Machine’s third full-time employee, Dave Sutton, had never had to take on extra work in order to support themselves, but Hype Machine’s advertising revenue had fallen so low that it was time for a reckoning: give up, sell out, or try to find a new revenue source. ![]() Unfortunately, the money finally got too tight. Without cash investment, they could never build everything they wanted to - but at least they didn’t have investors pushing them to double their audience every month. They built Android and iPhone apps, threw parties at South by Southwest, and added a ranking for music videos. This happened to imeem, a chatting service that added music sharing but ended up running out of cash and getting acquired by Myspace, which then shut it down. But it seemed like the music startups that took venture capital just ended up scaling too fast and taking on more costs than they could sustain. Hype Machine considered raising venture capital back in 2007, Volodkin said. “We’ve been pretty conservative with our finances so we’ve been able to have some time to figure out a solution. “A lot of spending is going to Facebook and a handful of large media properties like BuzzFeed,” Volodkin said. Programmatic advertising also brings in substantially less revenue. That meant Hype Machine’s ad partners no longer had success pitching it to brands as a small but engaged, specialized audience. Advertisers started to shift toward programmatic advertising, where buying and selling is done by algorithms on an automated market as opposed to being negotiated by sales teams. Its highest ranking was 4,951th, in mid-2010). Back then, even a smaller site could sustain itself through advertising (Hype Machine is ranked 16,757th largest website in the world by traffic, according to Alexa. That was the period when people shifted from downloading music illegally to paying to stream it online, industry watchers said. Today, the site has about 400,000 monthly visitors, said Volodkin, but its heyday was around 2009 to 2010, when excitement around streaming music - especially SoundCloud, which billed itself as YouTube for audio - was swelling. “I’ve had people email me to say they need to be on Hype Machine because their agent won’t sign them until they do,” Zoya Feldman, one of Hype Machine’s three full-time employees, told The Outline. It is influential as a tastemaker within a certain sphere it’s rumored to be a factor in Pitchfork’s selection process and the company has had to deal with labels and public relations reps attempting to game its charts. It also creates a playlist of most popular tracks based on what its users like. The result is a playlist of new music that is hot but also off the beaten path. He picked out hundreds of influential music sites and built an algorithm to scan them for audio files and aggregate the most blogged about tracks. Hype Machine was founded in 2005 by Anthony Volodkin, who was 19 and in college. How could a small music blog aggregator run by three 30-somethings from their apartments in the New York City area possibly survive? SoundCloud says it only has enough funding to make it through the end of the year. It’s a tough time for streaming music services.
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