
How We Make Money at Stack Overflow - ocoster
http://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/How-We-Make-Money-at-Stack-Overflow-2016-Edition/
======
tedmiston
> We are in the process of sending out an email now announcing Developer Story
> to the larger community in the hopes that we can help some percentage of
> developers. If that email is rejected, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you’re
> unresponsive to emails we send, we’ll unsubscribe you. If you mark it as
> spam, we’ll unsubscribe you.

How great it would be if every site would subscribe to such high standards.
Bravo, SO.

~~~
rbobby
> If you mark it as spam, we’ll unsubscribe you.

How would they know?

~~~
breakingcups
You can include a header in your email message where, if a user marks a
message as spam, Gmail / Hotmail / whatever will let you know.

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

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

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

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

~~~
smsm42
Leaks may have emails that are defunct, belong to dormant accounts nobody
reads, throwaway accounts like mailinator.com, honeypots, etc. This confirms
the account belongs to a real human actively reading the email.

------
brianzelip
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
> them-- plus, serving ads to people who won’t click on them harms campaign
> performance.

[0] [https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-
doesnt...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-
about-ad-blockers/#we-don%E2%80%99t-care)!

~~~
Bartweiss
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 their users basic faith in "see our ads,
and we won't destroy your machine".

But a promise to serve relevant, low-impact ads, chosen by actual humans?
That's something I'm willing to support.

~~~
arjie
Did you only do it today? 8 months after the announcement, because someone
happened to mention it in a comments thread? Doesn't speak very much to that
approach's effectiveness. Especially since you've got a strong opinion on it.

~~~
yuhong
The fun thing is that I think Reddit once used both types of ads. I don't
think they do that anymore though.

------
lucb1e
StackOverflow is an extremely valuable resource for all programmers. I've not
seen the option anywhere, but a yearly donation would definitely be something
I'd do for a substantial amount (substantial to me as a student, so it's not
the moon but not a beer either).

~~~
subhobroto
My following suggestion is a very unpopular one, but it is this:

If you are a student, use the money you would have donated to StackOverflow to
purchase a book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become an
expert.

If you are an expert, contribute your time to StackOverflow (instead of
money).

Money is easy to get compared to content. What helps StackOverflow grow is
quality content.

I am also interested how they approach the subject of money:

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our
> users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great
> business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great
> pride in the fact that we’re one of them.

Personally, I would love to see how this works out and I wish them well.
Hopefully they can prove this model works well. Users need this model to work
well for other businesses to adopt.

~~~
user837387
>>book or a tool that will help you to learn better and become

I've tried that before, many times. Unfortunately when you are trying to do
real work those books are many times useless. Example, I kept trying to build
a newtonian physics simulator so I got a Statics and Dynamics mechanical
engineering book. The book was a text book for Mechanical engineering students
and yet the examples they teach you are for toy problems. I could not
generalize them to real world scenarios. To actually build the physics
simulator I had to scour the internet until I found something that actually
explained what I needed in an easy to understand manner [1]. And that still
was not enough. I still had to use more online sources to find out all the
other pieces, like the separating axes theorem for collision detection.

So no, I would not rely on books anymore, at least not exclusively since they
often do not provide a full picture. One last thing, books seem to be getting
progressively worse in my experience. All of this is anecdotal of course.

[1][http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics](http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics)

~~~
Bartweiss
As an aside, buying a print reference book frequently feels counterproductive.

Even if I'm going to get a formal reference text, instead of online resources,
I probably want a digital copy. Otherwise, I find myself going "I wish I could
do text search for this thing..." and wondering why I didn't get the version
that actually allows that. When I read for pleasure I enjoy the physicality of
books; when I read for technical reference I demand the interface of a
computer.

~~~
johncolanduoni
For books without ebooks from the manufacturer but for which I can find an
illicit PDF or djvu, I usually buy the print one and read the digital version.

------
dolguldur
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.

~~~
chubot
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.

~~~
codinghorror
Joel, eh? Think you might be forgetting someone in there, somewhere? ;)

~~~
mattmanser
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always got the impression from the podcasts
that while you both designed it, it was more you actually programming it. I
could be mis-remembering after all this time!

Didn't you quit your job and program it while Joel was still mainly focused on
Fog Creek day-to-day?

~~~
codinghorror
Yes, it was Joel's famous "servant leadership". We brainstormed ideas once a
week on weekly calls (which became the podcast) and he trusted me (and Geoff
and Jarrod, the first two people at the company after the founders) to build
Stack Overflow as we saw fit.

Community feedback was a huge part of that feedback cycle once the beta was
live.

------
vlunkr
Another good article linked from this one:
[https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-
doesnt...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/02/why-stack-overflow-doesnt-care-
about-ad-blockers/). Stack Overflow is IMO the site to look to if you want to
do ads correctly. So many big sites have incredibly trashy ads, SO shows that
they care to not subject their users to that junk.

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

~~~
nicky0
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
morgante
> They're researching an answer ... do they ignore the issue and run off and
> buy something?

Yes, that's an entirely credible idea. To use the first ad I found as an
example, maybe I'm debugging an annoying issue with migrating my MongoDB
cluster and I notice an ad for a managed MongoDB service and realize I'd
rather pay them to deal with this.

> Of course I didn't buy anything, who lets advertisers tell them what to buy?

I do! There are millions of useful services out there and ads are an effective
discovery tool.

------
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.

------
Alupis
Perhaps it's time they consider paying Moderators for their time and effort.
It doesn't need to be anything large, even a small stipend will suffice.

Moderators are the real lifeblood of StackExchange. They spend countless hours
ensuring their respective Sub Exchange hums along. Yes, it's a volunteer
"job", but it's a job none-the-less - especially since once you become a
Moderator, it's more-or-less expected you have certain responsibilities and
obligations. Given StackExchange makes a pretty healthy profit off the efforts
of the "volunteers", and given StackExchange is a for profit company, it seems
fitting they should have to pay for the labor that creates their profit.

Currently, StackExchange kicks back and rakes in money via various avenues,
but then doesn't have to pay staff to actually manage the growing plethora of
Sub Exchanges.

We all give companies grief for underpaying or mis-classifying employees, but
somehow everyone overlooks StackExchange.

I believe it an accurate statement to say, StackExchange would not be a thing
today, if it were not for the innumerable hours worked for free by a growing
army of "volunteers".

~~~
prdonahue
Are you a moderator?

~~~
Alupis
> Are you a moderator?

No, and have never been. I have no dog in that race - but as a long time Stack
Exchange user, I witness these people's hard work every day.

------
chiph
> Every new email, except for transactional emails like “Forgot your
> password?”, sent through this system will have three links at the bottom: a
> one-click unsubscribe, a direct link to manage all categories, and feedback.

It's terrific that they're doing this. The first two links are what the CAN-
SPAM Act requires. The "feedback" link is not a result of complying with CAN-
SPAM, but is a good idea for any online business.

[https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
center/guidance/can...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business)

------
dep_b
I like Stack Overflow, but I seriously don't know how all these answers end up
there. I think about 80% of all my questions are answered sooner or later by
myself. And some of them are quite massively upvoted too afterwards, so they
weren't always niche problems.

------
cdnsteve
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.

~~~
dudeget
what's their stack?

~~~
Nick-Craver
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...](https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-
architecture-2016-edition/)

------
dtnewman
TLDR: They make money through ads, job postings and their enterprise product.
The author believes that they can make money and serve users at the same time.

~~~
blowski
In my opinion, they do a pretty good job of balancing the needs of users and
advertisers.

~~~
BipolarElsa
I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more...

I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students
could ask like unlimited questions.

Is this crazy?

~~~
finnh
How many questions does it take before you are banned?

~~~
0xmohit
If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor
(read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce
_significantly_.

~~~
Shog9
I wish. We've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and it hasn't. Quite
honestly, if we could get rid of the worst 20% of questions instantly, life
would be a lot better for the remaining 80%... But, identifying those 20% when
often SO is their only option is... Brutally hard. I've seen the same person
try to post variations on the same question dozens of times before finally
getting around the quality checks... Only to have it sink like a rock because
of course it was still unintelligible after all that.

------
mrfusion
I'm so happy we have stack overflow.

Do you guys remember experts exchange.com?

~~~
abraae
That site made me wish I could set up a "exclude from search results forever"
on Google.

~~~
jnky
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-
blocklist...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist-by-
goo/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef?hl=en)

~~~
TorKlingberg
Chrome only, has be installed on each PC, not on mobile. Bleh.

------
lordnacho
So is it cash flow positive? I hope so, because it's hands down the most
useful site for programmers. I even got the gold medal for using it every day
for a long time.

~~~
marxidad
They make over 10 million dollars a year.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Between 300 people cited elsewhere that's only $30k. Presumably they pay for
hosting, facilities. Doesn't sound like it leaves a lot of pre-tax pay unless
they're using primarily overseas workers in low-cost countries?

~~~
cjlm
$300k, surely?

~~~
pbhjpbhj

          10,000,000 ÷ 300 
        = 1,000,000 ÷ 30
        = 100,000 ÷ 3
        ~ 33,333
    

(commas for grouping)

Or 1e07/3e02 = 1e05/3.

~~~
cjlm
Whoops...

------
otar
I have tweeted about SO several minutes ago before I discovered this topic on
HN:
[https://twitter.com/otarch/status/798647799411675136](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 feel so excited when I find the right answer
after searching a solution for hours.

Just shut up and take my money!

~~~
skolsuper
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory)

------
jack9
> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us.

So they do direct deals mostly, which is antiquated and probably to preserve
their branding as a "tech site".

> Did you know we have a lot of unpaid inventory on Stack Overflow every
> month?

This is what trying to guess your avails with direct ends up doing. Leaving
inventory unmonetized. Typically, you get paid less for less of your inventory
trying to do monthly manual trafficking.

All they do is display, so it's rather silly to quibble about CPMs in the 25
cent range...until you look at the traffic and realize that translates to real
money.

~~~
ocoster
What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the
full inventory with automation.

You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you
are at risk of alienating your users.

At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off.

~~~
jack9
> What you are missing

Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have
recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being
a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally
monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using
and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they
want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed
tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice,
then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts.

Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That
schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are
not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.

------
cerved
It's great you are making money. If only there wasn't so many terrible answers
ranking no.1 on Google.. :-/

------
amelius
Upon reading the title, I thought they made it possible for users to make
money on Stack Overflow.

~~~
ProAm
They did with job placement potential.

~~~
jimlawruk
Good point.

------
subhobroto
Thank you for submitting this on HN. I am really happy to see the site grow.

> I am extremely protective of our users. You can ask anyone who works here.
> It’s is my very strong belief that we have a built up a trust with the
> community that is not easily earned and is impossible to replace. I want to
> work for a company that respects that trust, and I do.

> How much money we make is a direct proxy for how much we are helping our
> users. We focus on maximizing how we help users in order to make a great
> business. Very few companies have done this successfully, and we take great
> pride in the fact that we’re one of them.

I can see that they believe in this. As I wrote in my Quora answer
[https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-
in-201...](https://www.quora.com/Is-Stack-Exchange-still-growing-
in-2016/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1):

"They are gaining a lot of goodwill because they have committed to attach a
high value to user experience over monetary gain (they learnt from sites in
the past that lost their community because they plastered the site with ads.
Needless to say, those sites eventually failed)"

I remember other sites that did something similar but they got lost on the way
and sold their users away and ultimately fell to disrepair because no one came
back.

I hope they continue to stay true to this course.

> We don’t because if we don’t have anything even remotely good to show you,
> we shouldn’t.

> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us.
> We looked at this. It didn’t allow us the control we required to maintain
> the level of quality we want to maintain. We have intentionally left a lot
> of money on the table. Sacrificing quality is not what we want to be known
> for. We believe there are better ways.

In my limited experience with online advertising, one metric that almost all
advertisers ask for are page views.

I believe this is a fundamentally flawed metric. It can be gamed easily and
ultimately targeting ads by page views lead to a suboptimal user experience.

I would rather not show an ad than show an irrelevant ad.

SE is bigger than just page views. It’s a successful ecosystem that has a
vibrant community behind it that will grow and nurture itself.

It's great to see that their management would rather not show an ad than show
an irrelevant ad.

> If you have time though, I’d appreciate if you told me why in the comments
> so I/we can do better.

Introduce anonymous answers.

I know of very talented developers who would like to answer questions without
setting up (throwaway) accounts. Spam is a non-issue here unless spammers
model answers like good answers (of which we have a pretty large set to train
from)

~~~
jc4p
For my own curiosity, when you mean anonymous answers do you mean by people
who don't have accounts on our platform at all, or do you mean people who
already have accounts disconnecting their persona from a specific answer?

~~~
subhobroto
You got it in the latter (former would be even better). Explained here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12961447)

------
bluedino
Ads. Of course. And over half their staff is marketing/sales.

[http://stackoverflow.com/company/team](http://stackoverflow.com/company/team)

------
0xmohit
Does somebody has a clue about what % of the revenues come from ads and jobs?
I understand that there might be other sources too (documentation and such).

------
greggman
I would pay to get bugs fixed. The snippet editor has been broken for about 6
months. Funny that a site about code would have a buggy code editor.

------
Pica_soO
Would it be thieving, if i made a NN-Crawler, that condensed the Stack
overflow-Conversations into a query able chat bot?

~~~
ocoster
Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from
all sites, including Stack Overflow)?

No need to crawl anything.

You can find it on the internet archive:

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

~~~
aalear
And there's also the API -
[http://api.stackexchange.com](http://api.stackexchange.com)

~~~
ocoster
And the Data Explorer (use SQL in the browser to query the Stack Overflow
database): [http://data.stackoverflow.com](http://data.stackoverflow.com)

~~~
Pica_soO
Thanks, thats great..

------
kevin_thibedeau
Seeing their salary calculator makes me depressed what a 1-year experience 1x
developer in the NYC metro makes.

~~~
pcurve
Consider how depressed developer salary is in Japan, I'm surprised how well
Stackover pays... I'm guessing their Japanese office is tiny.

------
Hydraulix989
What do you think is the purpose of this piece?

Seems like it came straight from PR land to me.

------
DeBraid
tldr: Display Ads and Talent.

> We help companies build their brand and source technical talent through our
> business products: Display Ads and Talent.

------
jorgec
I love Stack Overflow but its community is right now poisonous that i don't
want to participate anymore but to be a lurker like many others.

My 2cents.

------
eanzenberg
Re: 'Why we make money'

Is it now shameful to make money, so you have to defend it when you do?

~~~
dbancajas
yeah. it's crazy. it costs money to run the servers itself. We are lucky they
haven't made the site subscription based or something.

------
chollida1
Interestingly, this article was flagged on the new page. I had to vouch for
it.

Weird that a previously flagged article made it to the top slot:)

------
motoford
I always thought they earned a nickel for every time they closed a question as
"not constructive"

------
overcast
At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The
attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable
of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God
forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM.

This sums it up well.

[https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-
overflow-7cb69fa...](https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-
overflow-7cb69faa575d#.oyn9b1aoz)

~~~
Zergy
I used to be very active on SO and I stopped because dealing with new people
to the site is a waste of everyones time.

SO has the goal of being a Q to A catalog. You're not contributing unless you
are asking a new, answerable question or providing and answer to a new or
existing question.

There are tons of people asking questions that are already answered, tons of
people asking questions that would take a book to answer, and tons of people
asking questions that are subjective and time sensitive. All of this needs to
be closed and removed.

The fact of the matter is that tons of questions have already been asked and
answered. In fact unless its for a newer technology there are probably not
that many left to ask. Because of this about 95% of all new content ought to
be removed. In fact you will find a vastly different culture if you stick
around the GO tag vs the Java tag.

But the issue is there is a never ending trickle of people who don't realize
the above. They sign up and start asking answered or impossible to answer
questions, trying to start discussions, or trying to make you debug their
specific issue.

You either ignore them or try and help them understand the site by telling
them to RTFM.

~~~
overcast
Your core group of know it all people, won't be around forever. If you keep
discouraging new users, by treating them like second class citizens, and a
"waste of time". Then the old boys club, is not going to last. I agree
entertaining basic programming questions is foolish, but I've seen many
examples of legitimate questions, that get the boot because they've been
addressed(poorly) previously. At what point do you start just running a Wiki
of programming answers, and not a community of programmers. Because the former
sounds like what the programming police at stackoverflow want.

~~~
JeremyBanks
I don't agree with your premise. I've seen many users join the site and
succeed in recent years, because they cared to understand what they were
joining, and how they could contribute to it. If you're only looking for an
answer for yourself, people are not going to cater to you. It's not a great
environment for random newbies looking for personal help because that was
never the primary goal. They're more expected to benefit _as consumers_ of the
content that more experienced programmers generate.

From the announcement of Stack Overflow, before the site was even in private
beta ([https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-
com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/)):

> _Stack Overflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange meets wikipedia
> meets programming reddit._

The community elements of the site are nice, and I have made some friends
there, but "wiki of programming answers" _is_ much closer to the original
vision of the site than "community".

