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In https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-exchange, it says:

Stack Overflow alone serving more than 26 million professional and novice programmers each month

This appears to be a somewhat perplexing statement. How does that correlate with the amount of registered users, and more so with the actual number of worldwide programmers/developers?

e.g. see http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers.

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    Good question. Probably only CrunchBase knows the answer?
    – Oded StaffMod
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:24
  • I would guess it's their estimate of the number of visitors per month.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:24
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    Which still doesn't entirely make sense, and raises questions about how this has been counted. To Oded - they typically got that number from someone they trusted, I assume, or would like to...
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:26
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    @matt - did you look at the team section? Compare that to the team page we maintain (which is not hidden and they could easily use as a basis of theirs). Then tell me - why do you trust their figures?
    – Oded StaffMod
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:28
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    @PatrickHofman the numbers are actually even slightly more perplexing if they are old
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:29
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    Related: quantcast.com/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc (quantcast statistics for the network)
    – Oded StaffMod
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 12:39
  • @Oded oh god, the hovering makes you all move. ... well, not all, but too many
    – user1228
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 13:10
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    Except for Oded @Won't. He moves us .... wipes away tear
    – Bart
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 13:13
  • Any idea how quantcast get their numbers, do they sit on the Internet backbone or something?
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 16:23
  • @matt Here is Quantcast FAQ page. It's a combination of many things like ISP backbone, tracking code, toolbar providers... etc. If you do a 'View Page Source' you will see Quantcast tracking code with 'quant.js'
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 21:43

2 Answers 2

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I am a regular visitor of CrunchBase site. It's one of the leading website as for the start-up companies funding round news goes. Their data is more accurate on the funding part. Rest of the data such as company description, team members, site stats, etc. is gathered (and added/updated by its staff members, official company employees, site visitors, etc.) from the various sources apart from official about Stack Exchange page. This data over the time does gets outdated and I have noticed the same with few other start-up companies.

But, as per the below excerpt (source: Content Guidelines) anyone can edit CrunchBase data: (emphasis mine)

CrunchBase is the free database of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. Our mission is to make information about the startup world available to everyone and maintainable by anyone. These guidelines explain our criteria for accepting and moderating content.

Above all, we want our dataset to be accurate. If you ever find information that is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading, please correct it. Remember, anyone can edit CrunchBase

Each profile on CrunchBase site including SE's profile page has an 'UPDATE' button on the top-right in each section for updating the existing info. There is also an 'ADD' button (top-nav) for adding new information.

As for Stack Overflow's '26 million' users goes, there are many sources that can be found by a simple Google search for "stack overflow 26 million". The 26 million represents number of 'unique visitors'. The SE's About page says: (emphasis mine)

Since then, the Stack Exchange network has grown into a top-50 online destination, with Stack Overflow alone serving more than 26 million professional and novice programmers every month.

Notice 'Serving' and it should not be treated as 'number of registered users'. SE currently uses 3 analytics companies (for more details see Joel Spoksy's answer) for measuring the traffic, keywords, etc. metrics. One of them is Quantcast and you can find the details of at Quantcast analysis (link given in the comment by Oded). Please note that Quantcast, ComScore (or any other 3rd party analytics company for that matter) will not give the 'number of registered users' stats as they don't have access to that private data. Some research companies reports / case studies mentions about the 'registered users' numbers but then they usually will give you the source (read next para) of that information.

The Stack Exchange's official All Sites listing page ('visits' shown are 'per day') gives the better stats of many things. I'm not sure on how often this listing page gets updated. One of the column on the listing page also displays the 'number of users' (tooltip shows "number registered and unregistered users") for each of the SE's Network sites. There is a big difference between 'number of visitors' and 'number of registered users'. I would also recommend reading the official 'About SE' page especially the '2014 Stack Exchange Network Statistics' section. As per the stats given there, it says there are 3.8M Registered Stack Overflow users as of year 2014.

P.S.

As per the "All Contributors for Stack Exchange" profile, you will see some of the Stack Exchange team members name such as Will Cole, Courtny Cotten, Erin Gray, etc. who have made contributions (see # in the contributions column) to it.

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    Great comprehensive answer. Well, it appears that by narrowing down to only the StackOverflow TLD on quantcast, and picking the monthly display there, the numbers are close to an order of magnitude smaller (~7.5M, looking at the people metric there, which appears to be the most relevant one). Whereas the numbers for the entire network are close to the communicated number of 26M. I don't want to say someone took the number and gave a different sentence around it, but it may appear as if quantcast is in stark disagreement.
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 16:20
  • So it is rather very awkwardly difficult to support that number with the data that is publicly available, it may seem, or does it?
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 16:26
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    @matt If I were to trust the numbers then I will have to go by the number given by Stack Exchange as they have the logs of traffic and the users registration. Quantcast or Alexa use different sources (internt backbone providers and other data) to display the results. But, at least we have some metric to compare.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 16:37
  • Thanks for trying to help, but I am not sure what you mean... the number 26M provided by Stack Exchange on the about page, isn't even supported by their public data query api/page, nor the numbers on stackexchange.com/sites#
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 18:37
  • @matt As for 26M goes on about page, I don't know when was the last time it got updated. I am not sure how often the stats under "All Sites" get updated either. Also, remember page visits/traffic goes up and down. It differs month to month. Only SE team can tell.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 18:50
  • It's somewhere between impossible to extremely improbable that there were 26 million users, and now there's just 5, or 7. Regardless of the pace of updating....
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 19:44
  • @matt no no ... it's other way... lot of time its kinda confusing when they (reporters) say "a website has 26 millions users visiting to their site" what they mean to say is "a website has 26 millions VISITORS visiting to their site"... as for the "registered users" goes the 5M approximate is correct.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 20:41
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    Dude, it's not reporters, it is what Stack Exchange put on their about page ;)
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 14, 2015 at 7:10
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    @matt I understand that and I was talking in general.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 15, 2015 at 0:06
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    @matt I noticed your 1st comment about "narrowing down to only the StackOverflow TLD on" link has 'country=US'. Why are you restricting to US Only? Stack Overflow serves to many visitors (and registered users) around the world. Here is what it looks like for SO GLOBAL - make sure to pick monthly display.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 15, 2015 at 14:52
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    Gee thanks, no idea why the default display was for only the U.S.... the numbers are of course, very different now, and closer to the StackExchange claim. Do you work for StackExchange or something? :)
    – matanox
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 6:23
  • @matt It does default to US because for most of the companies US traffic is the key metric. Glad to see that the numbers are close/better than what it's been quoted out there. No, I don't work for SE but it's a great company to work for.
    – HackerKarma
    Commented Aug 17, 2015 at 11:27
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I guess they picked that number from the about (that is a rather good copy/pasting what they did):

Since then, the Stack Exchange network has grown into a top-50 online destination, with Stack Overflow alone serving more than 26 million professional and novice programmers every month.

How does that correlate with the amount of registered users?

It doesn't. It is just the number of unique visitors on Stack Overflow I guess. The total number of users is somewhat about 5 million (I just took the currently highest user ID as a basis for this, it doesn't take deleted users into account).

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