AFAIK most of SO’s revenue comes from the careers site. Which is an odd omission from that post, since it mostly answers the question in the title. Kudos for valuing the UX – it really shows! But I suspect the single biggest answer is “because they don’t really pay the bills anyway.”
I just can’t help but to imagine that we might one day be living in a world where every news website becomes a paywall (e.g. the direction Wired is stepping in).
We’ll get what we pay for. I think it’s more likely that news sites will die - there are so many people willing to do high-quality writing for free, and it only takes a fixed amount of aggregation/organization to turn that into a news site.
I think we’ll more likely see payment (or possibly micropayment) networks, kind of like the current ad networks but not, y'know, advertising.
I don’t think this is a great outcome (in particular, paywalls over content lead to uneven access, which is a net negative), but I do think it’s better than having ads everywhere.
<cynicalComment>Of course it’s for porn.</cynicalComment>
I think Patreon is actually the start of this. It’s the first micropayment network. It’s a bit unusual compared to what I expect we’ll see more of in that a lot of it is voluntary donations in support of free content, but there’s still backer rewards, and I’m sure there are patreons which produce content exclusively for backers.
I think that it miss the main point: everybody want to use an adblocker, the only difference is between the person who know that they exist/know how to install it and others.
I would assume that most of their traffic are people landing from search results. How does that work with established trust? It’s hard for me to imagine drive by visitors to add an adblock white-list exception just for them. This really looks like an attention grab/marketing post based on the recent stir up on ad blocking. I would assume stackoverflow would be one of the most hurt with large ad block usage spikes (assuming they earn income mainly from ads).
Not true. I have 3505 on ServerFault, logged-in, and they’re now showing those awful pop-in-and-distort-my-click ads at /questions/tagged/nginx, calling it “sponsored links for this tag”.
Overall, I’ve noticed that recently they’ve been having all sorts of these “little” polish bugs here and there – the prime example being the new botched conversion of StackOverflow Careers into Jobs, and so many features stopped working.
AFAIK most of SO’s revenue comes from the careers site. Which is an odd omission from that post, since it mostly answers the question in the title. Kudos for valuing the UX – it really shows! But I suspect the single biggest answer is “because they don’t really pay the bills anyway.”
I just can’t help but to imagine that we might one day be living in a world where every news website becomes a paywall (e.g. the direction Wired is stepping in).
Not to worry, in a world where everybody pays for quality content, all the content is quality.
We’ll get what we pay for. I think it’s more likely that news sites will die - there are so many people willing to do high-quality writing for free, and it only takes a fixed amount of aggregation/organization to turn that into a news site.
I think we’ll more likely see payment (or possibly micropayment) networks, kind of like the current ad networks but not, y'know, advertising.
I don’t think this is a great outcome (in particular, paywalls over content lead to uneven access, which is a net negative), but I do think it’s better than having ads everywhere.
[Comment removed by author]
<cynicalComment>Of course it’s for porn.</cynicalComment>
I think Patreon is actually the start of this. It’s the first micropayment network. It’s a bit unusual compared to what I expect we’ll see more of in that a lot of it is voluntary donations in support of free content, but there’s still backer rewards, and I’m sure there are patreons which produce content exclusively for backers.
They have a team of 9 working on it, so they must at least make enough money to support that team. Otherwise they would cut ads and axe the team.
Maybe not. Investor money pays bills.
Ok, but it is at least important to them. That is 8 more than we had at my last company.
I really like this approach to the ad “problem”.
As I commented on the site:
I think that it miss the main point: everybody want to use an adblocker, the only difference is between the person who know that they exist/know how to install it and others.
Why don’t they use a wikipedia economic model ?
Ads are full crap.
I would assume that most of their traffic are people landing from search results. How does that work with established trust? It’s hard for me to imagine drive by visitors to add an adblock white-list exception just for them. This really looks like an attention grab/marketing post based on the recent stir up on ad blocking. I would assume stackoverflow would be one of the most hurt with large ad block usage spikes (assuming they earn income mainly from ads).
Indeed, SO doesn’t show (non-careers) ads to logged-in users at all.
Not true. I have 3505 on ServerFault, logged-in, and they’re now showing those awful pop-in-and-distort-my-click ads at /questions/tagged/nginx, calling it “sponsored links for this tag”.
Overall, I’ve noticed that recently they’ve been having all sorts of these “little” polish bugs here and there – the prime example being the new botched conversion of StackOverflow Careers into Jobs, and so many features stopped working.