Stack Overflow's Forum Is Dead, But the Company Is Still Hanging On

The spread of AI coding assistants like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude has caused a sharp drop in the number of questions and traffic on Stack Overflow. The recent monthly question count has fallen to 6,866, a level close to the early days after its 2008 launch, leading some to describe it as facing a so-called "death by LLM."

However, the company's profitability has actually strengthened. Annual revenue nearly doubled to about $115 million, and losses shrank significantly from $84 million in FY2023 to $22 million. This is because the revenue model has successfully shifted from being ad-centric to enterprise solutions and data licensing.

The main revenue models are as follows:

• Stack Internal: Provides generative AI features built on the vast accumulated data, now adopted by 25,000 companies worldwide.
• Data licensing: Sells high-quality data needed for LLM training to AI companies.

As developers' questions now increasingly move to private chats with AI, the accumulation of new public knowledge is decreasing, but paradoxically, a circular structure has formed in which LLMs need Stack Overflow's data.