

Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques - nands
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/25/stack-overflow-hits-10m-uniques-boldly-goes-where-no-qa-site-has-gone-before/

======
pierrefar
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.`

~~~
ig1
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).

~~~
spolsky
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.

~~~
ig1
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 :-)

------
niyazpk
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.

~~~
nikcub
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...](http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=stackoverflow&wm=false)

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 :)

~~~
ig1
Quora has become hugely significant in the startup community, it's probably
now the largest online community of startup people.

~~~
JasonPunyon
How can you tell how many users there are?

~~~
ig1
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.

------
nands
Stack overflow has probably been the best Q&A site around, content-wise, user-
experience wise and probably every other criteria a user would care about.
Good work !

~~~
AgentConundrum
Agreed. I've found it especially valuable as a bit of a teaching tool lately.
I spent three years in a mind-numbing COBOL-based job, and now I'm building a
PHP application to try to showcase the fact that I am more than the sum of my
career, and to try to find a decent job.

Since I'm doing this in isolation, I'm trying to use StackOverflow as a
surrogate mentor. When I have a question about how to do things, mostly design
issues, I can usually find an existing discussion (yes Jeff, _discussion_ ) on
the topic. It sucks up an awful amount of my time, but I feel like I've grown
a lot professionally because of it.

~~~
oiujhygtyhuji
About the only drawback is that it's now so popular that new questions only
show up on the front page for a few minutes. So finding questions to answer -
or getting your question answered is becoming harder - unless you are prepared
to do a very narrow subject specific search.

One of the nice things about the early SO was it was so broad, you could see
interesting questions that weren't directly in your language and read those as
well.

------
nhangen
Still a noob programmer, but I'm a huge fan of SO. I've yet to find a thread
with any real bickering or pretentiousness, and 9 out of 10 times find an
answer.

It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised
that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?

~~~
codexon
Quora has a much smaller community mostly composed of people interested in
start-ups in the Silicon Valley. They get coverage on sites like TechCrunch
and HN because of that and the founders left Facebook (most likely because
Zuckerberg replaced one of them as CTO with Brett Taylor).

I talked to them and they believe they can beat the competition simply by
piggybacking off Facebook's social system and by using AI filtering to prevent
people from being overloaded since they allow every topic unlike
Stackoverflow.

