That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a free account is simply a loss leader. But it never occurred to me, to treat it li

That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a free account is simply a loss leader. But it never occurred to me, to treat it like an 'SEO'/marketing line item on the budget. This is fundamentally a different approach and potentially VERY lucrative. You are absolutely right about SO. When they posted that 80% of their traffic comes from Google, that's when it occurred to me and I then decided to look at Github and see if it is true. Low and behold, when you search for obscure programming terms, Github comes up on the first SERP for many of those terms in the long tail. So it is user-generated organic SEO content (like Digg.com) but much more targeted to their market. Brilliant!