Traffic on Stack Overflow, a developer knowledge-sharing platform owned by Naspers, has dropped sharply since the release of OpenAI’s conversational AI tool, ChatGPT, according to data from SimilarWeb, a website traffic monitoring platform. .
According to SimilarWeb data, StackOverflow dropped nearly 30 places in the “Programming and Developer Software” website category, falling from 202nd place in October 2022 to 229th place by the end of December 2022.
In terms of absolute website traffic, the number of StackOverflow fell from about 279 million in November 2022 to 247 million by the end of December 2022, down about 12% in just one month. .
In December, a few weeks after ChatGPT’s launch, StackOverflow announced it had banned the use of AI tools generated as answers on its platform, citing concerns about the accuracy of such answers.
“…because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is so low that ChatGPT-generated answer posts are materially detrimental to the site and the users asking and looking for answers,” Stack Overflow said in a statement. said in
Stack Overflow says that due to the popularity of the ChatGPT tool, many users are posting these code snippets, putting a lot of pressure on their volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure. To reduce the influx of these ChatGPT responses, we have made the decision to temporarily ban people from creating posts using ChatGPT, and bans have been imposed on users who do not follow the rules.
With OpenAI’s announcement yesterday that it has updated ChatGPT with “improved facts and math features,” StackOverflow, which makes most of its revenue from ads running on its website, is not optimistic.
Naspers-owned Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion in June 2021. According to Naspers’ latest financial results, the platform saw him grow 33% to $45 million in the first half of 2022.
