Jump to content

StackOverflow sold to Prosus for $1.8 billion

igormp

Summary

The most used website for developers, StackOverflow, was bought by the investment company Prosus, for a "mere" $1.8 billion.

 

Quotes

Quote

Prosus said it struck a $1.8 billion deal to acquire Stack Overflow, an online community for software developers, in a bet on growing demand for online tech learning.

Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.

 

While perhaps not a name everyone recognizes, Prosus — the international assets holding arm of South Africa’s Naspers — is something of a giant. In 2001, parent company Naspers bought a 46.5% stake in Tencent for $32 million dollars. Earlier this year they sold a 2% stake of Tencent for nearly $15 billion.

 

My thoughts

SO is well known by every dev, one would've imagined that their valuation would be way higher, given their importance in the developer ecosystem. Nonetheless, going from Prosus' track record, it'll likely remain an independent website and there shouldn't be any drastic changes.

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by-prosus-for-a-reported-1-8-billion/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/software-developer-community-stack-overflow-sold-to-tech-giant-prosus-for-1-8-billion-11622648400

FX6300 @ 4.2GHz | Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R2 | Hyper 212x | 3x 8GB + 1x 4GB @ 1600MHz | Gigabyte 2060 Super | Corsair CX650M | LG 43UK6520PSA
ASUS X550LN | i5 4210u | 12GB
Lenovo N23 Yoga

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

SO has been of great help when I was staring off with programming, still does to this day. Hope it never changes or goes away.

1 minute ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

just imagine if that company was like "lol it sure would suck if you know... it went away" and pulled the plug. suddenly nobody would be able to develop anything 🤣

Yikes there go my code snippets!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

56 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

just imagine if that company was like "lol it sure would suck if you know... it went away" and pulled the plug. suddenly nobody would be able to develop anything 🤣

Sajeetharan on Twitter: "@StackOverflow is down at the moment. This is more  scary for developers than having production down. #StackOverFlow  #developers #humour… https://t.co/Bhf7GnFzDc"

FX6300 @ 4.2GHz | Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R2 | Hyper 212x | 3x 8GB + 1x 4GB @ 1600MHz | Gigabyte 2060 Super | Corsair CX650M | LG 43UK6520PSA
ASUS X550LN | i5 4210u | 12GB
Lenovo N23 Yoga

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, igormp said:

Summary

The most used website for developers, StackOverflow, was bought by the investment company Prosus, for a "mere" $1.8 billion.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

SO is well known by every dev, one would've imagined that their valuation would be way higher, given their importance in the developer ecosystem. Nonetheless, going from Prosus' track record, it'll likely remain an independent website and there shouldn't be any drastic changes.

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by-prosus-for-a-reported-1-8-billion/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/software-developer-community-stack-overflow-sold-to-tech-giant-prosus-for-1-8-billion-11622648400

Honestly, there is a huge "landgrab" right now for key parts of internet infrastructure

Domains https://www.circleid.com/posts/20210210-now-we-know-why-its-hard-to-get-a-com/ , https://www.circleid.com/posts/20210410-why-icann-rejected-isocs-billion-dollar-attempt-dot-org/

CPanel  https://www.dailyhostnews.com/cpanel-new-pricing-and-licensing-structure

CentOS https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-shifts-from-red-hat-unbranded-to-red-hat-beta/

are just the ones I know of offhand. Cpanel and CentOS are key pieces of software for hosting providers, and Cpanel's price has been hiked to a point that everyone using it has had to raise prices substantially after never having raised prices in the previous 5 years. Throw in the .org registry sale fail, we had a near-miss where a significant part of the internet might have been held hostage.

 

Quote

Disturbingly, ICANN may have already violated other provisions of its agreements with the U.S. government when it amended the .org registry agreement to remove pricing consumer safeguards in the weeks prior to the announcement of the failed .org sale.

 

Moving back on topic, I'd speculate that nothing good will come from this. 

 

Quote

 Prosus (the primary shareholder of Chinese gaming mega co/WeChat developer, Tencent) will acquire Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

That's not good. Everything connected to Tencent gets weirdly censored. Now, maybe it's too soon to go "oh they're going to turn StackOverflow into wikia/fandom.com", where it becomes beyond useless from the ads making the site break frequently. As it is right now, the stackoverflow runs fairly good with the existing ad system. 

 

But I suspect perhaps there might be an IP grab over the content in the wings. Suddenly StackOverflow owning all the shared code on the site and then going after public OSS projects that utilize it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

That's not good. Everything connected to Tencent gets weirdly censored. Now, maybe it's too soon to go "oh they're going to turn StackOverflow into wikia/fandom.com", where it becomes beyond useless from the ads making the site break frequently. As it is right now, the stackoverflow runs fairly good with the existing ad system. 

As someone who works in a company where Prosus has a majority percentage, I doubt it'll change anything. The company overall is pretty tech-forward and usually doesn't touches their investments, they just leave it as is until it has grown enough to be sold later on.

That's the case for most companies under the Naspers brand, so I'm not really worried.

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

But I suspect perhaps there might be an IP grab over the content in the wings. Suddenly StackOverflow owning all the shared code on the site and then going after public OSS projects that utilize it.

I really doubt so, doing so would kill the site in a single swoop, and then those 1.8 billion would turn into nothing in a second.

All code on SO is CC, and it makes no change to change it, there's nothing to gain by doing so.

FX6300 @ 4.2GHz | Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R2 | Hyper 212x | 3x 8GB + 1x 4GB @ 1600MHz | Gigabyte 2060 Super | Corsair CX650M | LG 43UK6520PSA
ASUS X550LN | i5 4210u | 12GB
Lenovo N23 Yoga

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, igormp said:

As someone who works in a company where Prosus has a majority percentage, I doubt it'll change anything. The company overall is pretty tech-forward and usually doesn't touches their investments, they just leave it as is until it has grown enough to be sold later on.

That's the case for most companies under the Naspers brand, so I'm not really worried.

I agree, the company seem to love flipping. They buy, make it grow fast and sell for large profit. Result, they have boat load of money and the company has grown

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

On 6/3/2021 at 3:29 AM, igormp said:

In 2001, parent company Naspers bought a 46.5% stake in Tencent for $32 million dollars. Earlier this year they sold a 2% stake of Tencent for nearly $15 billion.

HOLY wait let me do some math.....

 

ok so if we go off that 1%is $7.5 bil then that means their remaining 44.5% shares in Tencent is worth about $333750000000 or $333.75 billion. That is ridiculous compared to how much they paid for it.

PC: Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB 3200mhz RAM (8GBx2), Gigabyte B550M DS3H, GTX 1050 2GB, 650W Semi-Modular PSU80+ Gold

Phone: Poco F3 8GB + 256GB

Audio: Samson SR850s

Sound Card: SoundBlaster Play 4 USB sound card

IEM: planning to get the KBEAR KS2s
Please be patient with me, I'm fatally dumb and its honestly a miracle I've made it this far

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, Franck said:

I agree, the company seem to love flipping. They buy, make it grow fast and sell for large profit. Result, they have boat load of money and the company has grown

Yeah their investment has gone up by 1042870% in 20 years.....

 

honestly they really got a thing going on here

PC: Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB 3200mhz RAM (8GBx2), Gigabyte B550M DS3H, GTX 1050 2GB, 650W Semi-Modular PSU80+ Gold

Phone: Poco F3 8GB + 256GB

Audio: Samson SR850s

Sound Card: SoundBlaster Play 4 USB sound card

IEM: planning to get the KBEAR KS2s
Please be patient with me, I'm fatally dumb and its honestly a miracle I've made it this far

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

On 6/3/2021 at 4:14 AM, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

just imagine if that company was like "lol it sure would suck if you know... it went away" and pulled the plug. suddenly nobody would be able to develop anything 🤣

Not bragging, but I have like 3 shelves of books on computer science. I would have to switch back to 2007 coding practices. Fun, when you are a Java and scala developer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

The new parent company is already PRO-SUS..... IT DOESN'T GET MORE SUS THAN THIS GUYS!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Seems to be the next platform that needs a decentralized and/or federated version. Luckily, all we need is the official documentation most of the time. Maybe we actually would be better off getting rid of stack all together.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×