Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques • Hacker News Board

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#11

Post by nikcub » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 11:51 AM UTC

niyazpk wrote: post #8

This is a classic case for "Be so good that they cannot ignore you". For such a long time TC have deliberately refrained from mentioning/promoting StackOverflow. Thank you guys (the SO team and the contributors), for providing such a valuable website for programmers.

There was never a deliberate effort from TC to ignore StackOverflow, I linked to it in some of my posts there.

IIRC we simply were not in the loop on their news, announcements or tips.

A lot of the TC'ers use Quora which is why it is mentioned a lot, but in TC dev we were definitely big fans of StackOverflow, its just that the full-time writers didn't use it or notice it as much.

If you look at Techmeme, you can see that StackOverflow hasn't been getting much attention from the usual tech blogs:

http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=stackoverflow&wm=fals...

I figure it is for the same reason - they weren't actively reaching out to the tech bloggers and instead using their own blogs for PR. Still worked out well for them :)

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#12

Post by AgentConundrum » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 12:12 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #10

AgentConundrum wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on how they're counting uniques, but I doubt it has much, if anything, to do with how many accounts there are on the site. I just checked their users page ( http://stackoverflow.com/users ) and they 8003 pages of 35 accounts, which comes out to be "just" 280,105 accounts in the system, including people who just stop by once to ask or answer a random question (you don't need to create an account t…

[deleted]

Do you mean that you didn't sign up for the Careers service because you felt you had revealed damaging information about yourself

That's a big part of it, yeah.

potentially still edit some of that revealing information

Not really. I think the questions existence is damaging enough. The only way to get rid of it is to delete it, but I'm an inclusionist, and the question is bound to help someone down the line. I'm sort of alright with its existence now, it's a part of my past that will always be there so I shouldn't be trying to hide it.

change the username associated with the question

It doesn't work like that. I sort of wish you could dissociate yourself from certain things on that site, but you can't. I'd have to create a whole new account.

In the end it doesn't matter. I just did a search for Canada jobs on Careers.SO and it only gave me 8 responses, four of which were American jobs located close to the border. Careers offers basically nothing to be, and certainly not enough to justify paying for it.

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#13

Post by ig1 » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 12:54 PM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #11

niyazpk wrote: post #8

This is a classic case for "Be so good that they cannot ignore you". For such a long time TC have deliberately refrained from mentioning/promoting StackOverflow. Thank you guys (the SO team and the contributors), for providing such a valuable website for programmers.

There was never a deliberate effort from TC to ignore StackOverflow, I linked to it in some of my posts there. IIRC we simply were not in the loop on their news, announcements or tips. A lot of the TC'ers use Quora which is why it is mentioned a lot, but in TC dev we were definitely big fans of StackOverflow, its just that the full-time writers didn't use it or notice it as much. If you look at Techmeme, you can see…

Quora has become hugely significant in the startup community, it's probably now the largest online community of startup people.

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#14

Post by ig1 » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 1:04 PM UTC

pierrefar wrote: post #6

Just to be clear: 10 million uniques is measured using analytics cookies, quantcast in this case. The exact definition varies by analytics provider, but regardles, it has nothing to do the number of user accounts. Of course it's an estimate as there are complications in calculating it like users deleting cookies, one user with multiple browsers (ahem, programmers), etc. It's still an awesome milestone.`

Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#15

Post by JasonPunyon » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 1:29 PM UTC

pierrefar wrote: post #6

Just to be clear: 10 million uniques is measured using analytics cookies, quantcast in this case. The exact definition varies by analytics provider, but regardles, it has nothing to do the number of user accounts. Of course it's an estimate as there are complications in calculating it like users deleting cookies, one user with multiple browsers (ahem, programmers), etc. It's still an awesome milestone.`

It will never equate to the number of user accounts because we don't require users to register. You can get in on all that hot Q&A goodness account free.

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#16

Post by spolsky » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 1:56 PM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #14

pierrefar wrote: post #6

Just to be clear: 10 million uniques is measured using analytics cookies, quantcast in this case. The exact definition varies by analytics provider, but regardles, it has nothing to do the number of user accounts. Of course it's an estimate as there are complications in calculating it like users deleting cookies, one user with multiple browsers (ahem, programmers), etc. It's still an awesome milestone.`

Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).

Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million.

For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics.

In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada.

I haven't dug down to other countries but it's unlikely you could get to 15-30 million. Most development tool vendors report that about 40% of their sales are in the US.

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#17

Post by JasonPunyon » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 2:05 PM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #13

nikcub wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was never a deliberate effort from TC to ignore StackOverflow, I linked to it in some of my posts there. IIRC we simply were not in the loop on their news, announcements or tips. A lot of the TC'ers use Quora which is why it is mentioned a lot, but in TC dev we were definitely big fans of StackOverflow, its just that the full-time writers didn't use it or notice it as much. If you look at Techmeme, you can see…

Quora has become hugely significant in the startup community, it's probably now the largest online community of startup people.

How can you tell how many users there are?

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#18

Post by ig1 » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 2:19 PM UTC

spolsky wrote: post #16

ig1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).

Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million. For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada. I haven't dug down to other countries but…

I did something similar to you pick up numbers from individual countries and summing them, I don't have the underlying data to hand (I did this about a year ago). But I'll do it again as I need the data anyway and post an update.

IDC put the figure at around 12million in 2002, and at 15million in 2008 though. I assume they did a more thorough job than either of us :-)

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#19

Post by ig1 » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 2:24 PM UTC

JasonPunyon wrote: post #17

ig1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora has become hugely significant in the startup community, it's probably now the largest online community of startup people.

How can you tell how many users there are?

I'm not saying that with any scientific basis, but rather on the basis that a much larger percentage of the startup community seems to be active there than on other sites.

Often when you see someone ask about a random startup you'll get the startup's founder or an investor answering, something which you rarely see elsewhere.

Re: Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques

#20

Post by dagw » Thu, Nov 25, 2010, 2:35 PM UTC

spolsky wrote: post #16

ig1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).

Where did you get the 15-30 million number? We believe the number is closer to 9 million. For the United States, there are 1,336,300 programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The United Kingdom has 333,000 "software professionals," according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada there are 387,000 people working in IT according to Statistics Canada. I haven't dug down to other countries but…

I wonder what would happen if you changed your measure from "professional programmers" to "professionals who spend a significant amount of time programming". I know where I work a minority of the people who have to write some code to get their job done have "programmer" or something similar in their title.