Hacker News Reader

Comment by JosephLark | Hacker News Reader

It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize.

I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.

That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.

View on HN

I remember seeing an article here these past few weeks talking about the business model of Wikipedia and how it's supposedly inherently flawed. Wikipedia doesn't bring in a lot of cash, but it rather sets a sad tone for itself how unfortunate that may seem.

Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that Wikipedia doesn't bring in much. Their annual plan from last year [1] says that they expected to raise over $60M during the year. Unless anything's changed recently, they also try to keep over a year's worth of operating expenses in reserve, which means they're likely also sitting on almost $100M.

The complaints I see are usually related more to thinking that they really shouldn't need to spend so much (the FY17-18 plan for expenses is $76.8M [2]), and that their fundraising drives always make it seem like they're on the brink of death when they actually have a huge amount of money in the bank.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia...

Wikipedia's primary purpose is not to bring in cash, it's a non-profit, so the money is going towards mission-related activities and supporting the site. Generally, the current level is enough to support the site (check also [1] which is meant to ensure at least basic level of support more or less forever). If donations dry up (which they don't seem to be) the activities may be reduced, but "bringing in a lot of cash" by itself is not really the purpose, the cash is the means to get things done. It's a bit different for for-profit establishments when usually getting profit on the investment is at least one of the goals of the whole deal.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment

They've done a lot, but apparently it hasn't been particularly successful. Their new "Documentation" platform didn't really ever gain traction: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

I don't think I ever saw a Documentation page in a search result. Instead, I saw (and see) dozens of copies of the same SO Q&A content spread across multiple sites. I wonder if they would have had better success if they adjusted their SEO strategies and went after the rehosting sites (more?) aggressively.

Google was never pointed at Documentation, so you wouldn't find it there. There were constant concerns within the meta SO community about the quality of the content and how embarrassing it would be (not a small fraction of it was worse than W3Schools of old - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334638/ ). It could have been rather damaging to the SO brand to have such poor material shown as examples of what is desired.

Most of SO's operations are something I would not like to fund. I'd be happy to donate for their core service, but that's really only 10% or less of their headcount. Who funds the other 90% and why would they want to?

SO is too big to go for a Wikipedia style model unless they strip off just the core SO part and relevant engineers and make only that part donation based. And I'd guess the other 90% would end up in layoffs anyway.

> Most of SO's operations are something I would not like to fund.

Can you elaborate? Do you mean the other stack exchange sites like Photography, Gardening, Software Engineering, etc.? Or the careers site, or something else entirely? I'm only aware of the Stack Exchange network and careers.

Keep in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation also spends about 85% of the money they raise on things other than operational costs [1] (servers + engineering).

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=File%3A2014...

Plus another 20% for product development, and some other fuzzy categories like outreach

Reply on news.ycombinator.com