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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

Experts-exchange faces the same problem in StackOverflow that the proprietary UNIX vendors confronted in Red Hat and Cygnus.

The open source vendors were perfectly happy to turn a hundred billion dollar industry into a one billion dollar industry, as long as they sat on top of the smaller stack.

StackOverflow is clearly happy with a large piece of a smaller pie, and the "evil hyphen guys" are never going to be able to compete with that.

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I'm not so sure SO will lead to a smaller pie. The walled nature of EE limited its appeal to the largest part of the audience (the people looking for answers). So although their business model was more direct, they were basing it on a smaller corpus, with fewer viewers. An indirect (advertising-based) model over a much larger number of eyeballs could well make for a larger pie.

The challenge for SO is to see if they can maintain a high quality corpus as they scale, so people will keep producing and consuming their answers.

In my opinion, SO's main competition is technical forums and not EE. So while SO takes away from other Q&A sites, they're also taking forum traffic and monetizing it better.

I'm not sure experts exchange were making that much of a killing selling access subscriptions? There's clearly a lot of ill will towards them, but I would imagine they are still in a pretty good place if they want to move to a more usable ad supported model they would hardly be starting from scratch.

Well they were making enough to survive for 15 years, that's more than most businesses can say.

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