How does stackoverflow generate revenue

Active 9 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 12k times. More of a question for Programmers StackExchange. Edit: In fact, it's already a duplicate: programmers. Many of them have day jobs. A few probably work for companies that support their FOSS work. A few might monetize their FOSS work by charging for support. Sorry for the duplicate question. My bad. From our Obsession. The next big battles in tech are happening outside the Bay Area.

By Michelle Cheng Reporter. But the site is more than just about sharing coding snippets. Sign me up. Update your browser for the best experience. I only have 1 on top of the page when I go into a question and that one is always for Careers and the 2 on the right side if you can call them ads: Careers and Jobs near you.

Lundin I'm not sure of the exact aims and goals of StackOverflow but I'd hazard a guess that making money is not as important as the value gained from helping out others. I'd think of it more as a disincentive to have low rep. What's the alternative? Reward high rep users with full screen popup ads? My point here is: why does SO have a system that makes themselves dependent on low rep users?

That is not very productive for a site which is completely based on the rep system. If we solve all the current problems with crap posts and educate all users so they post flawless content, making a far better site Cloud rep or higher indicates that the user is a frequent visitor who is likely to return. MaximeLorant They will not make much advert money from brief visitors or non active users, will they? The ideal user would be one who is very active, yet fails to ever get rep.

Being dumb but active therefore makes you the ideal SO visitor, with this business model. They will leech unregistered visitors from Goggle on all programming-related searches, who'll get fed the adverts.

The problem then is when the SO content is so good that the unregistered visitor signs up, and becomes a frequent visitor. And if he starts posting good content and get rep, they will lose him as a source of income.

Better then if the SO content is crap, so he won't bother to sign up. Lundin I'm thinking it's down to what you see as the driving force behind SO. Is the driving force making money? Then place adverts for everyone, or is it rewarding good content - then reward good users with no adverts. Think we've sided with the latter. Especially not if they have investors who expect constant profit. Just look at Youtube, which was pretty much advert-free.

Then it became successfully mainstream, purchased by Google etc. Now you can't enter the site without drowning in advertisement.

Whether or not SO would do the same is entirely up to the owners, not the users. Lundin - Most people that access the site are finding questions that already answer what they need and aren't making accounts, asking questions or posting answers. In that sense, I think these complaints are very unique to Stack Overflow. Notice that the Meta post with the most votes had less than votes. And there are over 11 million users.

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