Here at TNOTB we’re big fans of the people in our “People We Like” links section. The people that run metal websites are truly amazing in how they bring us news, find us tons of great music, and teach us things that we would never have known otherwise. Today I am proud to present an interveiw with MetalSucks.net co-founder Vince Neilstein.  MS is one of the biggest baddest blogs on the net and for good reason. With a daily dose of humor and a dash of famous guest contributors MetalSucks is one of our favorite places to comment at.

In my exuberance to do the interview I may have asked just a few too many questions to fit it all in one post so we’re gonna break this thing up into 2 . Today in Part 1 our topics include, advice on running a metal blog, what he looks for when browsing the blogosphere, what he’d do if he ran TNOTB, and death threats?!.

If you could please give a brief history of MetalSucks. What made you want to start writing about metal?

There was never any grand plan. Before axl and I started metalsucks I would never have considered myself a writer. Axl and I have known each other since we were 5 and we’ve always shared musical tastes.

Like so many great ideas, the idea to start metalsucks came to us while stoned. One day between sets at an Amon amarth / children of bodom show I passively mentioned to axl that we should start a metal blog to fill a void in an Internet full of indie rock blogs. Axl somehow had the stroke of genius to suggest metalsucks as a name and the rest is history.

.net… seriously .net? why?

Someone else already owned the .com when we went to buy it. The .com later became available and we snatched it up, but we were already somewhat established and it wouldve been too difficult to move everything and re-train everyone to visit a new site. So we just set up a redirect on the .com that now forwards to the .net.

What was the hardest thing for you guys when MS was just starting out?

It was definitely hard to get labels / PR folk to take us seriously. But once we got one, it was kind of like a stack of (very slow moving) dominoes… Our traffic grew a little giving us more leverage, so more industry folks paid attention, which caused our traffic to grow … And so on and so forth.

If you could change one thing about MS that you haven’t been able to yet what would that be?

Well, we have a new site design that’s done and being built as we speak. It’s a small facelift but it also adds some new functionality. We’re really excited for people to see it and use it.

How many visitors is MS averaging a day recently?

A magician never reveals his tricks.

How many emails do you get a day? How much of the stuff from fans is crap compared to good nuggets of wisdom?

Usually between 100 and 200 a day. I’d say half of those are press releases from publicists and record labels. 50 or so might have to do with setting up exclusive, premiers, interviews or features, and the rest are from readers offering tips or bands asking us to listen to their music.

On an average workday how many hours are you logging?

A LOT, dude. Like I touched on before, so much work goes into this site behind the scenes. I spent only half of time (or less) actually writing. The rest is divided up between reading and responding to emails, making ad deals, setting up features, sending invoices, setting up ads in the system, running the accounting, maintaining our web server and making any tweaks necessary to the site… and that shit eats up a lot of time. I’d say I usually work 9 or 10 hour days.

Can you give us a brief rundown of your editorial process? Are there certain articles or topics you won’t run? If you decide not to run an article A how do you decide that and B do you discuss it with the author?

Axl and I have known each other since we were 5 so we feel really comfortable discussing issues such as “hey dude, i’d really love to write that article.” But most of the time it’s much less formal. If we see something we want to write about, we do, and we have a pretty good understanding of who likes writing about what. For instance, if there’s a story about Dave Mustaine being a dick I’m probably going to leave that to Axl to handle… but if someone sends us a video of same insane shredder he knows that that’s usually my territory. If it’s a potentially controversial issue we’ll usually discuss it first. With regards to the other writers, sometimes they write material as they please and sometimes we assign them stories, but they always turn those into us whenever they’re done, then we edit those pieces and decide when to run them.

What do you guys use for analytics and are there any specific things you track and watch for trends in?

We use Google Analytics. We watch everything… where traffic comes from, what types of content are the most popular, pages per visitor, pageviews, time on site, etc.

Any specific times you find it’s best to publish stories for maximum viewership?

Whenever people are most likely to be in front of computers. In other words, (roughly) 9 to 5 on weekdays. A lot of our readers work in offices or are college students so they aren’t as likely to be in front of their computers on the weekends or outside of those weekday hours. Also, Friday is usually a touch lower than the rest of the week so we try and hold exclusive content for Mon-Thur.

In regards to legal matters involving your website, being sued, slander, copyrights etc… Is there anything our little blog can do to protect ourselves?

I wouldn’t worry much about that. If it’s something really offensive or potentially slanderous, usually someone from the band (or their label, etc) will write us a personal note and we’ll handle it that way. Even a blog of our size is for the most part off the radar of people who would actually care to sue. The only time anything even close to that happened was when we got a cease and desist from Guns N’ Roses management group asking us to pull a leaked track we’d posted. We pulled it, and that was the end of that. Of course that’s not to say you won’t ever be sued (or we won’t), but in my experience people in the metal industry are very friendly and understanding and aren’t going to just slap you with a lawsuit without at the very least first trying to discuss it as human beings.

If you were in charge of The Number Of The Blog what’s the first thing you’d change?

Maybe a little bit of a cosmetic facelift but you probably already know that. Otherwise I’d just keep doing what you’re doing and refining your writing skills as you continue to discover your “voice.”

When looking at other sites do you notice any common problems or pitfalls that keep otherwise good blogs from being noticed?

The biggest problem I see with new metal sites is that they aren’t offering anything unique. Anyone can cut and paste news and blabbermouth already has that market owned. Yet still so many new sites attempt this as if they can somehow do a better job of copying and pasting. Also, some sites update once every few days and think that’s enough. Fortunately you guys have your own take on things and post quite often.

If you’re out cruising the blogosphere… what will make you pay attention to a site in the fist place. What will make you go back to that site again in the future?

It’s gotta have something interesting that isn’t being offered elsewhere.The writing’s also got to be good and it’s got to look and sound professional. If there are a ton of typos and everything looks sloppy, forget it.

We are going to try to avoid using ads on our site… Any advice on how to bring in revenue from other streams? Do the ads on MS bring in enough coin for ya’ll to survive on? Were ads always part of the revenue picture?

Bringing in revenue from sources other than ads is going to be tough… not to say it can’t be done. We tried affiliate programs with iTunes, Amazon and the like, where we get a small cut of any sales generated from traffic we send their way. Profits from these were negligible. Maybe there’s a way to work out deals like these but directly with bands/labels. Or maybe you can do that with merch. But at least for now, ads are the primary way any site is going to earn money.

When we started the site we weren’t thinking about or trying to make money at all. When we got to a point where we thought we had something of value to offer advertisers we started experimenting, and through trial and error we figured out a system that works. Axl and I consider ourselves extremely lucky that in the past several months we were both able to quit our day jobs and do this full time. But let me tell you, there is a LOT of work that goes into running this site behind the scenes that our readers have no idea about.

What is one thing that people on the outside looking into your world misconstrue or don’t understand?

That there’s a whole business side to running this thing that they never ever see. Like I said above, SO much work goes into keeping this thing afloat. There’s never enough time in the day. People have a misconception (which we perpetuate through our writing, naturally!) that we just sit around and smoke weed and listen to metal all day. We do that sometimes, but if we were to do that on a daily basis no work would get done.

Look for Part 2 of our Interview with Wince Weinerstien later this week when we jump into his life and current tastes, how a band can best get noticed by him, his thoughts on the future of metal and what he thinks of our very own Ziltoid! Stay tuned…. Oh yeah the death threats… You didn’t really think I’d put that in part 1 did you?

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