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.
We looked at advertising with them about a year ago and their options and response were both underwhelming. It wasn't possible to geo-target, it wasn't possible to advertise on most relevant sites (e.g. SoftwareRecs), and their upfront budget requirements weren't compatible with how we normally do things, which is to run a small test campaign to see what sort of traffic an outlet can drive and then expand if it goes well. On top of that, the response from their sales reps was curt and the last message in conversation, once it was clear that we aren't going to drop 50K, remained plain unanswered. So, YMMV.
Hi there! I'm Steve Feldman and I manage the Ad Ops team at Stack Overflow. I'd like to make a few leaps based on your comment and offer a little insight our business. I'm very interested in learning more about your experience.
- Based on your targeting concerns where we failed to adequately meet your request (geo, site, budget), I'm going to assume you tried to purchase advertising through our self-serve option. We offer self-serve specifically for advertisers who want to work with budgets below our minimum of $5,000 per month. In doing so, we hope to allow clients who still want to target our users an option while preventing our salespeople from burning out or being unable to provide an excellent advertising experience due to an excessive client load. Please remember: the long-term success of the Ad Sales team is reliant on the success of our clients and their ability to interact with Stack Overflow users in the smartest, most mutually-beneficial way possible. That takes time.
- Targeting via our self-serve option is limited to global run-of-site. This means ALL tags and ALL countries. Any advertiser looking to reach specifics types of users-- mobile, web dev, cloud-- will see better results working with a sales rep and spending that $5,000 minimum, as impression volumes will be too low to make a real, measurable impact through self-serve. We see greater success for self-serve clients with (a) products that benefit ALL developers and/or (b) products related to some of our larger tags on the site, front-end tags for instance, as the largest volume of impressions go to the largest tags when targeting run-of-site.
- Self-serve is currently limited to sites that have a large impression volume, ie: Stack Overflow and Super User. We don't currently offer any advertising on many Stack Exchange sites, and SoftwareRecs is one of them, unfortunately.
- If you can share the interaction with our team with me, I'm happy to look into it and make steps to speak with the entire team to ensure we're doing everything we can to have your experience with us be a positive one. If you're so inclined, send an email to adops@stackoverflow.com or to reach me directly, steve@stackoverflow.com.
I've managed larger advertising campaigns which would easily meet your $5k/m minimum but agree with the GP that your ad structure is a non-starter for me.
Whenever I've looked at introducing a new advertising channel, I always start with a test run of a few hundred dollars to see if it's worth investing more. I'm not going to drop $5k on an ad without knowing if I'll get any results at all.
It seems like you only offer two options for someone like me:
1. Run a test campaign without targeting and therefore get suboptimal results. This likely just lost you the sale of a bigger campaign (where I might get good results with targeting).
2. Risk spending $5,000 on a channel which doesn't give effective results. This isn't a risk I'd usually be willing to take.
Maybe you're targeting brands who are big enough to experiment with $5k buys or who don't test channels. Either way, I'm really not sure what the value prop is on the self-serve option.
Sounds like "if you're not spending the minimum then we don't want you ... unless you're a business that spend much more"? Surely the only businesses that would advertise without tag or geolocation specifying would be massive brands?
Are you shy about mentioning that you only want large advertisers; it's not possible you don't realise the ordering only makes sense for such companies, is it?
Geo-targeting is a must unless one's trying to build a "brand awareness" and need to spray everyone in sight.
In particular, in a context of trying to actually sell some professional/work software it's a norm and a common sense to target North America and Western Europe first and foremost. Conversely, and putting it bluntly, serving such ads to India is like feeding money into a shredder. So geo-targeting is absolutely essential.
Your question has been asked and answered, probably several times. You're getting banned because you refuse to learn about and use the search function.
Flooding SO with beginner questions lowers the usefulness for everyone.
There is no hard limit on the number of questions you can ask. If you are getting downvoted or banned you are probably asking low quality questions that are frustrating for the volunteers that answer questions on stackoverflow.
This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
Those bans (which occur for users who post many questions while receiving few positive votes) are for the sake of the community of contributors to the site. Allowing them to be bypassed for a fee would risk violating the community trust that's emphasized in this article.
After many years of being part of the Stack Exchange community I have come to the conclusion that folks will do whatever they can to avoid actually reading that page.
I've seen folks post questions on meta about how to get out of the ban (used to be a very regular occurrence, a bunch a day). I've seen folks post on other stack exchange sites asking how to get out. People even get emailed for this. All to ask questions which are answered perfectly well by the page they were linked to in the ban.
I've seen this so often that I can still remember the goo.gl URL that the old FAQ used to be behind (http://goo.gl/C1Kwu).
I have personally never used it and am unaffiliated with it, but a friend suggested it and has found it useful. He explained it to me as a dedicated, personal Stack Overflow.
Not crazy but out of scope. If you need a mentor get one but SO is not for mentoring. On the other hand even 49.99 per month is too cheap for a service like this.
You could try offering that money to a TA for a limited number of email assists or phone calls. They're usually both pretty strapped for cash and people who enjoy helping.
There is a cost to other users in time spent sifting through questions, so it'd probably need to be a student only area. In a business environment this is something people pay for, but not $50 at a time.
There is no limit - the only issue is if your questions are marked as bad. If you ask questions that are answerable and work on StackOveflow, you can ask as many as you like.
If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce significantly.
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.
Correct. This question - HOW MUCH MONEY does Stack Overflow make per year - was asked in their Meta site. Granted it's a privately held company but there is atleast 1 answer that quotes "credible sources" and pegs it at atleast 21 MILLION USD in revenues (for 2013).
