Spolksy and Atwood's StackOver is a huge success

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/

by staunch • 17 years ago

28 43 17 years ago

siteanalytics.compete.com

alexandros• 17 years ago

yet experts-exchange remains strong http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com+experts-e...

well, they do have many years of accumulated info and branding. No matter how horrible they are, it'll take time to dislodge them. I'm an occasional SO user and I like it very much, so I say good luck to Joel and Jeff in their quest :)

henning• 17 years ago

I don't suppose that has anything to do with their blatant use of blackhat SEO tactics. If StackOverflow wants to be to Expert Sex Change what Facebook is to MySpace, more power to them.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I wished there was a way to tell google to never ever include another result from a certain domain.

Not just the one page, no, everything. I'd subscribe as a paying customer if they offered that feature.

jreposa• 17 years ago

woah. that only speaks strongly to stackoverflow. they're gaining on experts exchange extremely quickly. if one of my sites gained on the competition that quickly, i'd be jumping for joy. with a giant grin on my face. for hours.

dasil003• 17 years ago

Umm, did you look at the graphs? SO is not gaining on EE.

staunch3• 17 years ago

I knew they'd be able to use their existing audiences to push the site but I think this is probably more than that. If the trend continues they really are going to have a huge amount of traffic and make a ton of money. I'm impressed.

spolsky2• 17 years ago

(a) It's Spolsky (b) compete.com is low by a factor of > 6. We had 2,373,587 unique visitors in the last month.

spolsky2• 17 years ago

Conclusion: compete.com has absolutely no respectable data, so don't look there.

staunch3• 17 years ago

Sorry about the name typo (<pre coffee excuse>). Although the absolute numbers are always wildly inaccurate, Compete tends to be fairly good at viewing the traffic trends for a site. Or does the chart look nothing like your own internal ones?

andrewljohnson2• 17 years ago

Sites like Alexa and Compete provide valuable data - you just need to know how to use it.

The number 1 thing you need to remember is that the data is not useful as an absolute measure - it's only good to compare sites.

The number 2 thing to know is that if you compare similar sites, the comparisons are more accurate. So if you compare trailbehind.com, everytrail.com, and backpacker.com, the comparison will be a lot more accurate than if you compare cnn.com, stackoverflow.com, and myspace.com.

Number 3 is these sites are more useful if you have benchmark data. For example, if you want to know the traffic for a magazine type site, go download their media kit (usually available as a PDF on their site), and it will tell you their traffic. Then you can use this data for understanding Alexa better.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

compete is absolute junk. So is analytics but less so.

sam_in_nyc• 17 years ago

Care to tell us how you managed to get that first wave of traffic? I'm guessing that having a popular blog helps, but who were the first adopters, and how did you get them?

kylec• 17 years ago

Being someone that got in fairly early (3-digit SO ID#), in my case it came from listening to the podcast. Months before the site went live, Joel and Jeff discussed the site and how it was being built.

You are right, though; the reason why I started listening to the podcast was because I enjoyed reading Joel on Software and Coding Horror, and I've continued to stay because the show is much more casual than any other programming podcast I've come across (other shows I've found tend to take themselves a little too seriously).

Anyways, that's just my opinion, but I do think that a podcast is a great way to build buzz for a site, and if you know of any shows similar to Stack Overflow I'd love to hear about them.

jyothi• 17 years ago

Terrific! Knowing that the actually number looks much better is mind-blowing growth.

Please tell us Joel, what do you think really mattered in order of preference or apprx credit (say)?

- a much cleaner, better product than anything that exists out there ?

- market need.

- Seed traffic (hence contributed content, satisfying experience and stronger word of mouth)

- High profile startup in relevant space.

- SEO

- word of mouth and viral effect because of satisfying experience

transburgh• 17 years ago

You cant use compete.com as a source by itself. It is best used to compare. So if it is always off by x% (or a range of %), you can still have a rough comparison to other sites.

palish• 17 years ago

Interesting situation... Should the title's "Spolksy" be changed to "Spolsky"? If it isn't changed, the title is inaccurate. If it is changed, your comment won't make sense to new viewers anymore. (Except now your comment would still make sense, because of this comment! Fun stuff.)

RossM• 17 years ago

Perhaps StackOver should be Overflow as well ;)

kstenson• 17 years ago

I think that StackOverflow.com growth now is being pushed more by the organic search results from google and the praise being sung by ordinary users in blogs and forums.

I think the site is excellent, and looking forward to more growth as more eyes provide better questions/answers!

lbrandy• 17 years ago

Poor Jeff. Did most of the work, and his name still comes second. I feel for you, man.

old-gregg• 17 years ago

I have a question for frequent SO posters: what do you get out of it? I like more choices and I think the resource is fantastic for googling, kudos to Jeff&Joel, but in my case, when googling doesn't help and I need to ask someone, it just seems that IRC beats it hands down: why would I go to SO asking jQuery questions if there's #jquery on freenode where John often answers questions himself? With something like jRuby or Linux hosting the picture is even better: JRuby lead programmers always hang out in #jruby, bunch of smart folks helping each other in real time.

Whereas I see people ask a question on SO and... what exactly do they do next? Sit for hours hitting 'refresh' every minute or so? SO is great for googling for similar questions answered in the past, but I just don't understand why people post questions there in the first place.

Sometimes I think that if IRC hasn't existed and someone would have launched it now as a fresh idea, all tech blogs would be filled with "IRC changes everything" and "the game is over for slow HTML-based collaboration"

Am I missing something?

daleharvey2• 17 years ago

I think most people just havent realised that what they actually want to do is to chat, there is a technical and social stigma, people already have a web browser, just point it to google and getting the help is the same as doing whatever else.

As for the technical, I remember the first time trying to get on irc and as a cs undergrad, wondering why the hell it was so complicated, I run an xmpp chatroom and that is only marginally easier, these arent inherent problems with the protocol, just the software around is entirely unusable. facebook / meebo and mibbit are helping overcome this, but it isnt there yet.

I have wondered how to solve the problem chat knowledge being unable to persist, even with public chat logs, an answer on a forum etc is still much easier to comprehend for a 3rd party than an irc log, but havent come up with much

ijntybvrt• 17 years ago

You can search SO, you can see the dozens of other answers to similar questions and you can see other answers by the person answering you. Realtime works for some set of easy quick answers - if the answerers are in your time zone.

daleharvey2• 17 years ago

I am pretty sure its the opposite, a complicated questions needs a feedback mechanism, you say X is wrong, I ask well what happens with Y, whats the output of Z. this really works better in realtime.

I find a lot of application / language / library developers are in irc reasonably often, whereas the questions on forums are a bit more of run of the mill how do I do types

tow21• 17 years ago

I'm not a frequent SO poster, but I've asked and answered a couple of questions. Personally, it's a combination of:

1) I find IRC completely unusable - I've been on the net since 1994, I've tried IRC multiple times, and it just doesn't gel with my head, sorry.

2) I don't use SO when I need an immediate answer. At the very least I'll put a query in, then wander off and google some more in the hope of finding an answer, then come back in half an hour. More usually I'll leave it overnight while i get on with something I do know how to do. It feels like the same sort of dialogue timescale as a mailing list query, but for where there isn't an appropriate mailing list.

But I may not be typical.

adityakothadiya• 17 years ago

Check this TwitPic's success! http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitpic.com/?metric=uv One man show, and amazing growth of small little Twitter app!

jli• 17 years ago

I'm surprised how they got a huge audience so fast. When I search for answers to technical problems on google, they appear on top results very often.

asmosoinio• 17 years ago

Me too! Last few weeks I have been working with Python (which makes me smile after Java and C++) and looked up plenty of stuff like "how to elegantly get first day of week N", and about 50% of my questions were answered in SO.

rsobers• 17 years ago

Okay great - but how do you monetize it now?

mickt• 17 years ago

They're getting a lot of traffic, but is it really a success; are people learning or getting or understanding the best answers to their questions?

Are there enough smarties (experienced smart programmers) on the forum to answer all the inane newbie (inexperienced programmers) questions? And if there's too many newbies it's possible that incorrect or sub-optimal answers will get voted up because there aren't enough smarties to realise what are optimal answers.

Spolksy and Atwood's StackOver is a huge success

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