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How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.blog

161–170 of 227 posts

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#161

A reminder that you don't need to use the latest or fanciest tech stack to achieve success in business. In the case of SO, boring wins, it's proven and seems like it allows them to focus on their product and to create new value for users.

what's their stack?

If curious, I did a post on that a while back. I'm settling into a new house and will pick this series back up soon.

https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What information does this reveal besides your email address, which they clearly already have?

It confirms that the address is valid, and most likely attended by a real person.

But there are gazillion email leaks. Go scrape them all with hashed passwords. Active emails have no value.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#164

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…

Just because an ad network is automated doesn't mean you can serve malware through ads. Just because an ad network uses manual bidding doesn't mean it's malware free.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#166
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is quality content. I do, >10k rep on the security.stackexchange.com site. I just think it's an amazing platform that I'd like to support with hosting and development costs.

> 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 didn't prompt them to sign up first.

I wonder how much trouble it'd actually cause spam wise.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#169
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they do that? Seems great for this use-case but terrible information to give bad actors.

What information does this reveal besides your email address, which they clearly already have?

It's a feedback signal showing success at passing automated spam filters.

Re: How We Make Money at Stack Overflow

#170
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually surprised ads work at all on StackOverflow. I would have guessed that most of their visitors are blocking ads.

Most of the ads are served to non-logged-in visitors who come to specific question pages through a web search. SO actually shows you fewer ads the more reputation points you have.

What's the flow there for a user? They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and buy something? I sometime have poor focus but when you're problem solving it seems the least likely time to distract yourself with shopping.

I did once follow a Google ad about 10 years ago, but in my defence I was just surfing cool tech and the image looked interesting. Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy?

I digress.

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