With a Quantcast world traffic rank of less than 1000, Stack Overflow has become the most visited website for developers and software engineers. It doesn’t require a genius to figure out that the site is raking in tremendous advertisement revenues while the full potential of its monetizing capacity hasn’t been unleashed yet because the creators decided that the user experience comes a much higher priority.
The site currently serves 6 million monthly unique visitors. Microsoft MSDN has less traffic. Consider the community nature of the whole Q&A application, the total number of page views should be appalling.
Yet it is merely up for a year and a half.
Joel and Jeff are the top at what they do, plus a little marketing twist. They are the best in the industry and they know their business inside out. People follow them, not just people but really smart people just like them who know a hell lot about how to get things done the right way. That’s the kind of critical mass Stack Overflow enjoyed at the launch to quickly embark on an exponential growth pattern. Quality start. It then took off by unstoppably producing insanely useful content every minute of every day, which you literally can’t find anywhere else on the Internet. These are detailed, sensible answers from friendly, experienced programmers who are thirsty to help you out, usually within 10 minutes of you asking the question.
How can Google not love the content? How can the users not love the site? How can it not succeed? If it weren’t Joel and Jeff who themselves are software heroes, how can Stack Overflow ever take off so quickly let alone attracting the smartest of the world’s programmers to passionately create content for it?