Ask HN - How do Quora, Reddit and SO monetize? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN - How do Quora, Reddit and SO monetize?

25 pointsfactorialboy26 comments

I mean they provide a great service, but surely display ads can't be their monetizing strategy.

Will each of them eventually have to revert to an Experts-Exchange styled business model?

Or am I missing something very obvious? :)

In the case of Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange, see Jeff Atwood's (slightly dated - IIRC job candidates are no longer charged) answer to "What is Stack Overflow's business model?":

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/79435/what-is-stack-...

And their Careers 2.0 employer page:

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/employer

Reddit displays ads and sponsored stories (which lately have become almost indistinguishable from regular stories).

Reddit Gold probably makes them more than either of the above, but I'm just pontificating here.

SO can probably monetize pretty well with ads - their demographic is much more targetted. I think they also have a paid jobs posting service. Again, just speculating. I don't know the financials of either of these companies.

Sponsored stories? I haven't seen anything about that on reddit.

There are per-subreddit (and sometimes general) sponsored stories on the top of each page, separated by the rest of the actual page by a big box.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/LvkN5.png

Reddit Gold probably makes them more than either of the above, but I'm just pontificating here.

I think you're misusing the verb to pontificate. Maybe you wanted to say guessing instead?

SO can probably monetize pretty well with ads - their demographic is much more targetted.

Here you're mildly pontificating when you're telling SO what they should do to monetize their service.

I think I'm using it just fine - talking out my ass.

Ah. Language drift.

Interestingly(?) I haven't seen an add on reddit in a long time. And that is without adblock. There used to be Amazon ads fairly regularly a while back, but now all I see are pictures of burgers, adverts for subreddits, flash games and 'thanks for not using ad-block'.

I wonder why they haven't ditched it or done something about it. (I totally agree with your suspicion that reddit gold earns them more).

You probably have. The links that appear in the top bar of the site are (usually) paid. Not all ads on the site take the form of a square image on the right.

It's interesting that no one have answered how Quora makes money.

They dont seem to have one yet.

But here are possible avenue they could explore.

http://www.quora.com/What-could-Quoras-long-term-business-pl...

StackOverflow makes money off their jobs board: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/

whether it is enough to support the rest of the company- I'm not sure.

And the ads obviously.

As noted, I think employment opportunities are one way to potentially get some cash. the bigger opportunity is being able to quantify knowledge and expertise in a subject. All these sites can verify and demonstrate a given understanding and communication of concepts, experience and expertise. Seems like the way to drive revenue would be to provide a potential employer or current employer with a skills evaluation or the ability to find expertise.

Plus, all have the ability to connect people who would pay for access to individuals with info or knowledge. Similar to Gerson Lehrman Group.

Interesting.

"Recently GLG has created Hightable (formerly known as G+),[26] a professional question-and-answer website, edited and organized by its community of users to compete with Quora[27] and to attract more experts to their platform."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerson_Lehrman_Group

I think Craigslist is a good model: Stay lean, and find one or two small areas of the site that people are willing to pay for, then use that to fund the rest of it for free.

Try posting it on Quora for a direct response from founders

http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers.h...

Do you have any context for this link?

I'm not sure about Quora, but Reddit has Reddit Gold (monthly subscription, $4/month I think) and Ads (I'm not sure of anything else), and SO has the jobs platform where businesses are charged to post employment opportunities ($350 for 30-day listing) and again, I'm not sure of any other monetization strategies for SO.

I read someone's estimate of SO's revenue a couple years back. Does anyone know if this was a reasonable estimate or not?

http://blog.olegkokorin.com/2010/03/04/stackoverflow-revenue...

Amazon's affiliate program

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting...

You know, and this got me off the Facebook: "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

I'll wager dollars to doughnuts that all those sites are selling user data to Madison Ave et al.

You'd lose a lot of doughnuts.

So what about credit cards and bank accounts that have no annual fees (essentially free to use)? I suppose your money is the product being sold (in terms of interest) in this case.

Stores have to pay to use Visa, etc. So you're still paying for that credit card via slightly higher prices.

They have your eyeballs, now they just need someone to pay for them.

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