"Spolsky says that two-thirds of its revenues today come from recruitment services, via its Stack Overflow Careers site, and one-third from advertising."
I found this very interesting. Stack Exchange is an insanely useful service, but I struggled to figure out how they would monetize it. (Similar to Wikipedia) They're received enough money that exit valuation expectations are high. I guess the cash flow projections from these are enough.
I worry about exit strategies. Stack Overflow was supposed to be "programming-question forum, done right." We've seen a lot of old people come through with the strategy of "build up critical mass of questions+answers, then enact paywall."
I'll probably always be skeptical that SO is just about to become ruined, unless they explicitly move it into a long-term strategy where the careers board is all they want for revenue.
Worth keeping in mind that, because everything contributed is licensed to us via CC-BY-SA, we essentially have to compete against our own content - if we make the user experience awful, there are plenty of other sites willing to take the same information and present it better.
> we essentially have to compete against our own content
What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what?
If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.
Not sure what you're asking; we have to publish it or else it ain't exactly a website.
Beyond that, not only are there plenty of sites scraping us (the better ones use the API, the worst ones don't throttle and get throttled) but we periodically publish full archives, hosted by a neutral 3rd-party: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange - kinda hard to take back something that's been torrented.
You probably didn't follow the early years. I just can't ever see them taking the site-with-a-dash's monetization strategy.
It's exactly why they made it in the first place, they repeatedly rubbished expert's exchange in the podcasts and even went so far as to creative commons the content, you can download all the questions and answers if you want.
I think a paywall will kill it, and they know that. Perhaps more focused ads is the way to go. The value of programmer eyeballs is a lot higher than grandma.
They're getting that revenue because they've got high-quality candidates.
I worked at a firm that was also doing well in the careers space, and that was because when CVS/Walgreens/RiteAid was looking for pharmacists (for example), we could ensure that their ads were only shown to pharmacists, and not plumbers, cashiers, truck drivers, etc.
So the chain stores knew that not only that their ad dollars were being well-spent, but that the candidates they were getting were already well-qualified, saving their HR departments time & effort in filtering out those that weren't. Frankly, I feel we were under-charging them, even though we had excellent revenue figures.
I found this very interesting. Stack Exchange is an insanely useful service, but I struggled to figure out how they would monetize it. (Similar to Wikipedia) They're received enough money that exit valuation expectations are high. I guess the cash flow projections from these are enough.