Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they always put the community first, they have until this recent change been hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend 5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers.
By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".
But what is the value of something that actually helps users get answers faster? What is the cost of someone waiting around trying to find an answer? I can tell you from experience having implemented my fair share of content systems that:
1) You can always get them cheaper than the list price
2) If it works, the software pays for itself in less than a year
You can always get a tool for low-cost (or even free with open source). Having something that is already used by developers and has a good reputation makes it a pretty easy sale in my book.
Per Joel Spolsky himself "We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for Teams and Enterprise) are growing at 200% a year."
Of that amount, the jobs product brings in close to 70% of the revenue.
I suspect your challenges with using jobs has to do with scale. It is competing with other companies that are spending a lot more, thus getting served up more in searches and thus generating more impressions.
Your comments about marketing though...yeah, that is daft. Swag costs next to nothing.
Because even in a small company, searching past content and conversations in Slack is a pain. The information gets lost. There is no reference back, so people just end up asking the same questions again, which is both super annoying and a gigantic waste of time.