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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

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Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#191

Post by thewhitetulip »

andreasklinger wrote: post #136
ssharp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most sites do this already, at least they should if they want to make sure more of their emails don't end up in junk folders. Deliverability is really important to both businesses and email service providers, so a lot of the time, bounce unsubscribes and spam unsubscribes are baked in and easing off subscribers who don't open or click emails is a best practice for deliverability purposes.

Yes it's pretty much common best practice Mail providers offer sending to your webhooks or block them directly on their side (so you dont have to worry about it)

Many do that probably, Indian firms don't for sure, I always block them, spam them and complain via twitter and after weeks of follow up do they remove my email id from their spam emails.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#192

Post by scardine »

Bartweiss wrote: post #92
brianzelip wrote: post #13

Great answer to a related FAQ in a post[0] linked from this article, about why !SO doesn't care about ad blockers: > The truth is: we don’t care if our users use ad blockers on Stack Overflow. More accurately: we hope that they won’t, but we understand that some people just don’t like ads. Our belief is that if someone doesn’t like them, and they won’t click on them, any impressions served to them will only annoy the…

And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads. Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke…

There is also a nice feature: if you have enough reputation there (I'm among the top 1%) you will have an ad-free experience.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#193

Post by skolsuper »

otar wrote: post #160

I have tweeted about SO several minutes ago before I discovered this topic on HN: https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136 StackOverflow is so powerful resource on the Internet, alongside with Wikipedia and Internet Archive. I wish I could donate two ways: 1) Yearly or monthly (subscription) donations, like on Wikipedia 2) I would be extremely happy to donate authors of some great, life-saving answers. I…

SO intentionally does not want to integrate payment of any kind for answerers because of Motivation Crowding Theory[1], the idea that intrinsic motivations like altruism can be crowded out by extrinsic motivations like profit, which is problematic because intrinsic motivation is generally stronger and effective for longer than extrinsic motivation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#194

Post by brazzledazzle »

Nition wrote: post #166
subhobroto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site That's amazing! Thank you for your contributions. I meant to imply that donating money is usually the least fruitful way to contribute, in my experience. It should be your last resort; definitely not the first one. Example: One way SO can really gain from your security expertise is for you to think about how anonymous answers can be supported. That will be far m…

I have to agree. This happens on forums as well. I've Google searched something before and found people discussing my problem on some random forum. Maybe I know something that might help, but its a hassle to create an account to post. I bet that happens on Stack Overflow too. People who'll never bother to create an account find a page about a problem through Google and they have something valuable they'd add it if di…

I suspect there would be a lot of challenges with it but perhaps letting high rep users validate anonymous contributions would help with the spam. Reveal them only to authenticated users and you remove the incentive for SEO spam.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#195

Post by latchkey »

I paid a good amount of money for the jobs listings because it is Stack Overflow.

The sales person was very persistent and available while the negotiations were happening to use their service (yes, you can get discounts). As soon as I paid, she disappeared and was never to be heard from again. No follow up at all.

I also got zero good jobs references for an extremely profitable tech business in the heart of downtown financial district in San Francisco. All the people who applied were basically spam and that wasn't any better than just posting on LinkedIn or HN for free.

Not really a complaint, just one small data point to consider.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#196

Post by edem »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #173
edem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not crazy but out of scope. If you need a mentor get one but SO is not for mentoring. On the other hand even 49.99 per month is too cheap for a service like this.

You could try offering that money to a TA for a limited number of email assists or phone calls. They're usually both pretty strapped for cash and people who enjoy helping.

What does TA mean in this context? Technical Architect?

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#197

Post by huhtenberg »

stevvve wrote: post #146
huhtenberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: balancing the needs of advertisers - We looked at advertising with them about a year ago and their options and response were both underwhelming. It wasn't possible to geo-target, it wasn't possible to advertise on most relevant sites (e.g. SoftwareRecs), and their upfront budget requirements weren't compatible with how we normally do things, which is to run a small test campaign to see what sort of traffic an out…

Hi there! I'm Steve Feldman and I manage the Ad Ops team at Stack Overflow. I'd like to make a few leaps based on your comment and offer a little insight our business. I'm very interested in learning more about your experience. - Based on your targeting concerns where we failed to adequately meet your request (geo, site, budget), I'm going to assume you tried to purchase advertising through our self-serve option. We…

Steve, to comment on just one aspect -

Geo-targeting is a must unless one's trying to build a "brand awareness" and need to spray everyone in sight.

In particular, in a context of trying to actually sell some professional/work software it's a norm and a common sense to target North America and Western Europe first and foremost. Conversely, and putting it bluntly, serving such ads to India is like feeding money into a shredder. So geo-targeting is absolutely essential.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#198

Post by sah2ed »

scardine wrote: post #192
Bartweiss wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a great explanation in the piece of how SO works to serve only quality ads. Good enough, in fact, that I'm whitelisting Stack Overflow from my adblocker. I don't do it often, I don't even do it for sites I like; the reality is that anyone using an automated ad network is at significant risk of serving malware, and I don't approve even if I'm protected. I don't visit Forbes at all anymore, ever, because they broke…

There is also a nice feature: if you have enough reputation there (I'm among the top 1%) you will have an ad-free experience.

I'm guessing at your level of being among the top 1%, you'll likely not need to actively seek work; instead great employers will seek you out hence their conscious decision not to annoy you by showing you ads.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#199

Post by sah2ed »

chubot wrote: post #59
dolguldur wrote: post #24

Stackoverflow is the prime example for how a company can generate tremenduous value without making that much money. It's difficult to estimate its contribution to the world economy quantitatively, but I'd definitely say billions, many many billions.

How do you know they don't make that much money? I didn't see that anywhere in the blog post. I agree that they make an enormous contribution to the world economy. Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.

> Joel really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? His goal was to get rid of that and it worked.

You left out the other co-founder: codinghorror [1]!

FTFY:

Joel [and Jeff Atwood] really did knock it out of the park -- remember expertsexchange? [Their] goal was to get rid of that and it worked.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=codinghorror

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#200

Post by leppr »

tedmiston wrote: post #148
my_ghola wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not sending an email in the first place? If their product is so great, they don't need to spam anybody, specially developers, to go look at it.

I really like email as a discovery channel for new products personally. Is there something else or another format you prefer?

Probably going to get downvoted for the unpopular opinion but community curated news sites ala. Reddit/HN are way better at this than private communication channels like emails.
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