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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

One problem that seems to have come up a few times is their inability to make serious revenue. This is a perennial issue for sites aimed at developers that don't sell products - coders + advertising don't mix (well).

I get the impression Joel's looking at expanding the SO model into other non-developer/non-geek niches where advertising could work, but I'm not convinced he's proven the revenue model enough to make it a tempting investment just yet. Anyone know any different?

Note: On another post, someone reminded me of the Careers move, so that's one easier-to-monetize stream at least.

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If they allowed me to embed their system into my site to provide "smarter" message boards, I would gladly pay them a set-fee/month.

They don't need to care how I monetize my sites.

[Sadly now they do not allow this in any way]

You can't embed, that's true. You can pay a set fee and run your own however: http://stackexchange.com/

Not as part of another site. ie site that has more than just stack-exchange. (And they don't allow iframes)

Now we know what you've been up to.

"their inability to make serious revenue"

To somebody like me who doesn't really understand advertising, it seems like the value of an impression ought to be really high for StackOverflow. Based on the tags associated with my userId and the questions I've read, they pretty much know which technologies I use everyday. How much would it be worth for EnterpriseDB (the PostgreSQL folks)to advertise to someone who is wondering how to covert his Oracle database to MySQL? Perhaps, even with 6M users, there are so few people in any coveted niche that the friction overshadows the value?

How many programmers don't have some form of adblock in their browsers?

Judging by many of the questions on SO, I'm surprised the people asking them can even manage to use a web browser with the default settings.

If someone ran a malware-ad campaign on SO, I'm sure a significant number of people would be infected.

Considering how often I rebuild my dev machines, I couldn't imagine tracking down all these obscure plugins every time I built a box. Firefox gets installed, along with Firebug and the AWS plugins, then sits idle in the taskbar until I need to use it for testing something.

I'm actually surprised by how many programmers DO have adblock.

Some of us automate our installs.

Check out the FEBE and OPIE plugins for firefox. Host the archives someplace (dropbox works well) and write a little install script and you're done.

Installing stuff by hand is so last century...

I'm actually surprised by how many programmers still install stuff. :)

Advertising on SO. Sure, you can get highly targeted advertising that could help solve peoples problems. Converting Oracle to MySQL could have Oracle promoting tools to do just that on that very page. However, all those impressions are essentially people coming to the site, looking for an answer, and leaving. If the answers aren't there, they go back to Google and look for another answer.

Advertising on something like SO is almost like advertising your latest application on the Pirate Bay. I just don't see the value.

I'd be quite keen to advertise my to-be-launched-soon coder community site (that's not competing with SO) on SO, but they have no self serve system and I'm not paying the $20+ CPM they'd probably quote if I contacted them direct.. :-)

Do that and let me know what kind of return you make from advertising on SO. Until then, everyone is "keen" until they have to open up their wallet.

Appreciate the cynicism, but at the right price I (and doubtless many others) would do it for sure. An advertiser's idea of the "right price", though, is bound to differ from theirs ;-) Given that developers have a low CTR.. the CPM would have to be "very low."

I'm not sure I've seen anybody report hard numbers on this, but anecdotally what I've heard is this: geeks don't click on ads. Any site that targets geeks has a harder time making revenue from advertising than one targeting non-geeks, by a significant margin.

> ...geeks don't click on ads.

I think it's rather "geeks don't see ads".

It's worth noting that the sorts of ads most non-enterprise programming sites run aren't the sort of ads that the adblockers strip out by default (major networks, Flash, etc). You could manually add them, but I don't know if people go to the bother in large numbers if they're not horrid, intrusive ads.

I use EasyList, and all these ads are blocked.

Exactly. Many (most?) geeks use an adblocker.

And don't they like to mention so all the time. It's the computer equivalent of "I don't own a TV".

Probably more like "I have have HD reception" - opting out of ads improves your experience a great deal.

I do use an adblocker, but even before I did, I think I'd just used the web so much that it was almost like my brain had gotten used to the general pattern/shape of ads on web pages to the point where I just unconscionably ignored them.

That's called "banner blindness". It's important to keep in mind that banner blindness applies to things that look like ads, not just ads. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

Good point. But I'd also be interested to know the experience level of users involved in Nielsen's study. My own anecdotal experience suggests that people less accustomed to the web are far slower at discerning what is an ad and what is content.

On a related topic from that link, I don't think I've ever come across a banner ad made to look like a dialog box that has been good enough to fool me. But again my experience seems to suggest that those with less computer experience are far more easily fooled.

You're right, but since you follow me on Twitter, you must have missed my numbers on this.. ;-)

On Ruby Inside, Rails Inside, and Ruby Flow, I run a cpl million ad impressions each month and make an OK amount of money from it despite the CPM being deathly low (say $2-$3 on a per ad basis). The CTR, however? It's south of 0.5%.

I also ran an Adsense for Feeds experiment for a few days recently. Don't have the numbers to hand but it was 1 click in approximately 16,000 impressions.. and these are real, unblocked impressions. I made 40 cents. Developers don't click on ads. "Geeks" do, though, IMHO.. otherwise sites like Slashdot wouldn't bother.

Compare this to Adsense ads on my old, archived personal blog.. and they run at over 20%.

I click ads. They interest me often, but I cannot honestly think of the last time (if ever) that I bought something from one.

The less web savvy the audience the higher the click through, best CTRs I ever experienced were on myspace related sites, my target audience was 15 year old kids judging from profile links I saw.

Yeah, I had seen your numbers, but I was referring to some sort of larger study on the matter.

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition. That is something that I think is a bit under-rated. I think that matters when evaluating products - I know that I tend to favor brands that I've heard of in some way vs something completely unfamiliar.

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition.

That has been cited by some advertisers, for sure - especially those who are recently funded or have larger branding budgets.

Take New Relic, for example. They're sponsoring The Ruby Show for I'd guess (and I don't know for sure, but basing on rates of similar podcasts) at least $300-$500 per show? There's no way they're getting that much business from people listening to the show checking them out at that very moment. In terms of brand awareness, though, $5-8k a year is nothing if almost every Ruby developer has at least heard of you..

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