How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

How We Make Money at Stack Overflow
stackoverflow.blog

Weird that a previously flagged article made it to the top slot:)

> I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here. It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to work for a company that respects that trust, and I do.

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them.

I can see that they believe in this. As I wrote in my Quora answer https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-in-201...:

"They are gaining a lot of goodwill because they have committed to attach a high value to user experience over monetary gain (they learnt from sites in the past that lost their community because they plastered the site with ads. Needless to say, those sites eventually failed)"

I remember other sites that did something similar but they got lost on the way and sold their users away and ultimately fell to disrepair because no one came back.

I hope they continue to stay true to this course.

> We don’t because if we don’t have anything even remotely good to show you, we shouldn’t.

> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us. We looked at this. It didn’t allow us the control we required to maintain the level of quality we want to maintain. We have intentionally left a lot of money on the table. Sacrificing quality is not what we want to be known for. We believe there are better ways.

In my limited experience with online advertising, one metric that almost all advertisers ask for are page views.

I believe this is a fundamentally flawed metric. It can be gamed easily and ultimately targeting ads by page views lead to a suboptimal user experience.

I would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad.

SE is bigger than just page views. It’s a successful ecosystem that has a vibrant community behind it that will grow and nurture itself.

It's great to see that their management would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad.

> If you have time though, I’d appreciate if you told me why in the comments so I/we can do better.

Introduce anonymous answers.

I know of very talented developers who would like to answer questions without setting up (throwaway) accounts. Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers model answers like good answers (of which we have a pretty large set to train from)

If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an expert.

If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of money).

Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content.

I am also interested how they approach the subject of money:

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re one of them.

Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well. Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work well for other businesses to adopt.