I wonder if StackOverflow is able to pay for itself or perhaps is generating lots of revenue. I like its business model a lot: job postings, enterprise application, ads. I haven't seen anyone talk about their revenue or if it's even a public company.
Will StackOverflow be bought by a bigger rival, like Google, Yahoo? Will it go public? Is it profitable?
On the podcasts, Jeff has stopped referring to the "meager wages" he's paying Jarrod and Geoff. in fact, they've both been brought on full time, so certainly SO is making something. But I wouldn't expect to ever hear full details since it's not really our business.
QuantCast puts stackoverflow.com at about 3.0 million uniques per month. Given that they have such a targeted audience (all of us are interested in programming) I would think they could charge juicy rates for advertising. I would guess that they are getting $7.50 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) which would put their monthly revenue at $22.5k, annual revenue $270k. This is completely a guess and almost certainly wrong.
WebTrafficAgents guesses that stackoverflow.com is making around $320k/year.
I would guess that it will stay private. Jeff and Joel like owning their own business, and with a decent amount of revenue from it, there is no real reason to sell out.
Going public now a days is more trouble than it is worth, and since SO doesn't need to raise capital to continue, it would only cause headache (and loss of revenue due to sox compliance).
I think the only indicator on how the company/family is doing is to see the dev team and owners still actively involved in the progress and growth of the sites. They are obviously making some revenue through advertisements on the family sites, but StackExchange seems to be where the real dollars will be.
You could argue that the four SO sites are really a test platform for StackExchange... So ultimately, you'll probably never know how much money is in our out, but will know that things are OK with as much involvement as you see today...
You are looking way too far into the future.
I cannot guess how much the SO-family of sites makes from their ad revenue, job postings, etc. I also do not see anything in the forseeable future that would change the business model for those sites.
They are developing the StackExchange framework which I imagine is where they are looking to generate as much revenue as possible in allowing other users to create their own Stack sites.
