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.
I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions.
Is this crazy?
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.
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).
This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
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.
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.
- 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.
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?
Or did I miss something?
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.
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.
Also, why are these posts getting downvoted? The title of this article is "How We Make Money at Stack Overflow".