Deal: Stack Overflow Sold To Prosus For $1.8B

If you’re a software developer, chances are you know Stack Overflow, the go-to Q&A site for developers. Well, there’s big news…

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If you’re a software developer, chances are you know Stack Overflow, the go-to Q&A site for developers. Well, there’s big news in that regard, as Stack Overflow has agreed to be bought by Prosus, the foreign holding company of South African tech giant Naspers.

  • Prosus is paying $1.8bn to buy Stack Overflow, marking a solid exit for the thirteen-year-old company. At the price, it’s Prosus’s biggest investment in the world of online learning.
  • Stack Overflow getting sold to Prosus may be good news or bad news, depending on who you ask. For Stack Overflow’s shareholders, it’s likely very good news, but for the developers contributing the huge stacks of content on the site, they may not be that happy.
  • With its sale to Prosus at a price of $1.8bn, it’s possible that the acquiring company would seek to recoup and justify its investment with serious monetization. In that case, there could be a paywall coming to Stack Overflow and that’s not likely to sit well with the software developers answering questions there.
  • However, for Stack Overflow’s stakeholders, a $1.8bn sale is very celebratory. For context, it’s roughly 12x the $153mn in total venture funding that Stack Overflow has raised.
  • Major Stack Overflow shareholders in line for windfalls from its sale include Andressen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Index Ventures, and Spark Capital.
  • Prosus moved to buy Stack Overflow shortly after it sold a small part of its stake in Chinese tech giant Tencent for nearly $15bn. It’s the biggest shareholder in Tencent thanks to a super-lucrative $32mn investment it made back in 2001 that morphed into hundreds of billions of dollars.
  • Prosus is a major investor in tech companies globally. Its current holdings include India’s Swiggy, Chinese travel site Ctrip, Tencent, and Russia’s Mail.ru Group.

5 Comments

  • All stackexchange content is under a copyleft license [1]. There are people out there that have upto date of all the content. Putting up a pay wall will just backfire, so I'm sure they won't be dumb enough to do that.

    [1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

    • Doesn't that only apply to existing content? They could put up a wall for new content if they wanted? Or extra content or perks for paying customers? Or add free content for paying customers? Imagine being forced to watch 10sec ads in order to see answers to questions. Or only paying customers see all the answers, etc..

  • Meh, it's not the go-to site for me and hasn't been for years. The overzealous moderation there still hasn't helped reduce the amount of low-quality questions and answers posted there. Sure, they have some good info sprinkled amid the complete garbage posts that comprise the majority, but you have to wade through tons of crap to find those rare gems.

  • Anyone stupid enough to contribute content to this "mob makes truth" service deserves what they get. The premise was flawed from the beginning.

    • Yes clearly it was flawed, only achieving top tier status as a reference source for the global programming community and being bought for 12x annual revenue. They're clearly a product of folly that never rose above being a laughing stock. /s I'm guessing you got shot down on there a few times if you're going out of your way to comment on something that is clearly so valueless for you.

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