#31 How does Stack Overflow make money?
48th most visited website in the world. 100M+ visits from people in tech
Hi there! If you find the newsletter content valuable, I would really (really!) appreciate it if you could share the newsletter with your network. It’s easy - You can click here to tweet about it. If you stumbled across this directly, you can find the previous editions here and subscribe to receive a weekly copy in your mailbox!
About Stack Overflow
The website serves as a platform for users (mostly developers and programmers) to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to a wiki or Reddit.
🐣Founded 2008
💵 Undisclosed Series E. $459 million post Series-D.
💸 $153M Funding Raised
👩💻 14 million registered users, over 21 million questions, 31 million answers, and 100M+ visitors per month
How does Stack Overflow make money?
Stack Overflow for Teams - a SaaS Team collaboration product
It’s a private version of the Stack Overflow website deployed for enterprises. Imagine you work at Microsoft and have proprietary code that you cannot post about on the public website, the Stack Overflow for Teams will allow an enterprise like Microsoft to host an internal knowledge sharing tool for its teams to collaborate.
Teams is currently used by thousands of companies, including startup Zapier and corporations Bloomberg and Microsoft, Stack Overflow says, and has doubled its revenue each year since its launch. The startup forecasts that Teams will account for about one-third of its overall revenue in 2020; Stack Overflow says annual recurring revenue for the product is expected to reach $27 million this year.
Stack Overflow Talent - employer branding solutions for technology teams as well as Job Ads.
Stack Overflow also has a Jobs section to assist developers in finding their next opportunity. For employers, Stack Overflow provides tools to brand their business, advertise their openings on the site, and source candidates from Stack Overflow's database of developers who are open to being contacted.
Stack Overflow Advertising - Advertising to reach 100M+ people in tech
Stack Overflow makes a large portion of its revenue from Ads. These are banner or content Ads that users see when they are on the Stack Overflow website to the 100M+ technical people that visit its site.
Stack Overflow offers a PPC (price per click) model for these Ads.
To conclude, Stack Overflow is now using the trust from its niche audience to build a fast-growing SaaS+Ads business 🚀
Hope you like the newsletter content! For more such content, follow me on Twitter. To share this with your network, you can click here to tweet about it.
If you stumbled across this post and would like to receive a weekly article about innovative business models, you can subscribe to this newsletter by dropping your email here.