Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/20/quora-begins-making-money-with-the-introduction-of-advertising/

by phodo • 10 years ago

73 64 10 years ago

techcrunch.com

heisnotanalien• 10 years ago

How innovative. How inspiring.

gchokov• 10 years ago

How disrupting. The dream of every Harvard student.. sell Ads!

TheLogothete• 10 years ago

Yeah, yeah, every Joe Startup wants to change the world with their Airbnb for dogs.

azazqadir2• 10 years ago

I knew this would happen. It was only a matter of time.

adamqureshi• 10 years ago

Genius! Now this is called innovation.

raverbashing2• 10 years ago

Quora has become a collection of loaded and low-effort questions (the answers are still good though)

But there wouldn't be much loss if it closed

strictnein• 10 years ago

What, you mean questions like "Was Bill Clinton a cooler president than Obama?" [0], which is currently featured on their homepage?

[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-Bill-Clinton-a-cooler-president-th...

raverbashing2• 10 years ago

That is certainly not one of the worse ones.

m52go• 10 years ago

I wonder if this means the end of their dreadful sign-in wall...since ads are base on content (supposedly).

codezero2• 10 years ago

They can still show ads on pages people hit from search results where they show a single answer.

jbb555• 10 years ago

Quora is still going? wow...

azazqadir2• 10 years ago

It is actually a good website with a nice community. Sure there are some spam and useless answers, but there are experienced users as well who contributing with great answers.

ececconi2• 10 years ago

So much of Quora is knowing who to follow.

spectrum1234• 10 years ago

Good. Quora is a great website. It was only a matter of time and this looks like a decent way to do it.

ctack• 10 years ago

I'm sure it's amazing, although I could never bring myself to sign-in. It always seems too "click-baitey". Sort of like "we have the answer but you have to sign in to get it". So I've always just let them have their answer and gone elsewhere.

CaptSpify• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the old experts-exchange results that used to show up in google

datawrangler• 10 years ago

If you're on Chrome, there's this plugin to deal with the sign-in prompt: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-quora-login-...

rm_-rf_slash3• 10 years ago

Quora's problems today are a direct result of what made them popular: celebrity.

They made a great big splash when the media genuflected to the idea that "You can ask a question about Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg could answer!" So regardless of the question or answer there will always be dominance by celebrities and their celebrators gleefully upvoting anything they post regardless of underlying fact.

I prefer Stack Exchange. The site is less about being the best person to answer and more about the answer itself. There is far less correlation the number of fans a given user has to their number of up votes and likeliness to be accepted by OP as correct or most helpful. I find real discussion occurs when we lose our preoccupations with who we are and focus on the subject matter instead.

CiPHPerCoder2• 10 years ago

One thing I love about Stack Exchange is the ability to add "This advice is INSECURE! See Beth's answer below for a better way to solve this problem." to accepted answers with really bad suggestions.

rm_-rf_slash3• 10 years ago

These kinds of answers get called out fairly quickly.

nickpsecurity3• 10 years ago

I briefly played around on StackOverflow and StackExchange Security as Nick P. I remember doing exactly what you describe a few times where some bullshit or sometimes wisdom from other comments/answers needed attention. One, which didn't mention other author, got changed to accepted answer and was about half my karma haha.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16062432/protecting-java...

I figured the site was addictive like digital crack early on. Wisely avoided spending too much time on it. Anything like that. (Pauses to look at address bar.) Or did I...?

autotune• 10 years ago

That explains why the most popular questions are about getting a job at the big 4, or IQ bollocks.

wrsh072• 10 years ago

It would make for an interesting network to analyze, though. Because you could essentially decrease the weight of successive "similar" votes [eg if two people who are fans of the same celebrities vote, their votes could be discounted slightly].

In this way, Quora could try to use a sophisticated voting system to suss out the best answer.

rm_-rf_slash3• 10 years ago

Voting is an inefficient way to find the truth. And weighting votes against celebrity posts is just punishing success.

I think Stack Exchange does this best with the ability to edit answers, but at the very least people who disagree should be able to state their case without being pushed to the bottom of the thread.

bmm6o2• 10 years ago

The Quora experience is very polarizing. Some people have the exact opposite reaction from yours. My take is that a lot of people in SV view it positively and that's why it's always been such a VC media darling, but that the your view predominates in the rest of the world and that's why it hasn't really been successful.

FWIW, I agree with you; I find it a little gross and fawning with a lot of appeal to authority.

emodendroket• 10 years ago

I don't know, what about, like, Jon Skeet, who could post a totally wrong answer and garner gazillions of upvotes

kyriakos• 10 years ago

Advertising is where business ideas go to die. (but with obvious exceptions).

Answers on Quora are really good its the Question quality that bothers me. Its like people ask for things just for the sake of asking.

flashm• 10 years ago

It seems to be the last resort to make money if you haven't got a real business.

Not everything has to be a business though. Quora (in my mind, at least) would be good in a distributed/federal setup, as would twitter.

bmm6o2• 10 years ago

It's kind of discouraging that this is where they ended up. I'm not a huge fan of the site itself, but 2 years ago they joined YC and raised $80 million, and this is the grand vision that finally emerges?

overcast• 10 years ago

In the words of the late Jim Morrison, this is the end.

sevensor2• 10 years ago

Quora has accumulated a great collection of personal-opinion essays. Even if all of their uses quit in disgust today, they've got enough well-written content, acquired on the cheap, to sell ads for years to come. They may actually break even some day. Which, to paraphrase another commenter, is every Harvard grad's dream.

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

They may actually break even some day.

I get the sentiment, but the fact that someone can say this about a company that, at one time, sat on a billion dollar valuation is mind-numbing.

Pure SV echo-chamber product on so many levels. Self promoters heaven. Quora offers nothing that I can't get somewhere else on the internet, and the fact that I can't move from link to link without logging in is stupid.

afarrell2• 10 years ago

I don't understand this. Every company I've worked with has struggled with the problem of making it easy for new people to learn the answers to the sort of detailed questions that Quora excels at. Since 2007, I've wished I could pay them money to deploy quora.internal.piedpiper.com, but no.

Why?

https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Quora-sell-its-product-to-o...

kfk• 10 years ago

What about discourse?

afarrell2• 10 years ago

I thought the goal of discourse was as a place for discussion, not for authoritative answers to questions.

vtlynch• 10 years ago

"[Quora] recently reported that it has 100 million monthly visitors... with 15 percent from India."

Interested in knowing the ratio of questions:answers coming from Indian users.

codezero2• 10 years ago

Don't be deceived. The visitors include search traffic, so this isn't representative of the content creators. I expect the percentage of content creators to be higher than the passing observer percentage.

nickpsecurity3• 10 years ago

That was my concern. Hence asking for more specific information.

ececconi2• 10 years ago

I use Quora a lot. It seems that 70-90% of people who upvote my answers or new followers are from India. Not saying that's a bad thing at all. From an advertising standpoint, though, they would make much more money per capita with more engaged users from the United States, England, or other English speaking nations.

Note: Quora is only available in English at the moment.

borplk2• 10 years ago

15 percent from India are probably the growth hacker and SEO expert firms spamming.

nilkn• 10 years ago

I actually like Quora a lot. I see that it gets a lot of hate on HN and I've never felt it was wholly deserved. I understand Quora had some hostile practices in the past towards users and has made some bad decisions at times, and I've even spoken against their login policy here on more than one occasion, but I have to say that I'm still fond of the overall product and experience. It's exceptionally polished and it certainly has succeeded in producing a valuable resource which improved upon or fixed many of the issues of Yahoo! Answers. I hope Quora continues to find success for years to come.

I see others are mentioning Stack Exchange, but I think the two communities are entirely different. Stack Exchange is good when you have a very precise question which likely has a very precise answer and can easily be categorized into a very precise topic. If any of those three conditions fails, you're more likely to just meet hostility there than to get an enjoyable discussion.

sevensor2• 10 years ago

I agree, in that I enjoy the experience, and that it offers something Stack Exchange doesn't. Stack exchange does its level best to eliminate questions whose answers are matters of personal opinion. Quora's whole product is personal opinion.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

I installed a chrome plugin just to blacklist Quora in Google SERPs a couple years back. I think I did make an account at one point, but it was just a terrible experience clicking through to find that you couldn't actually see the answer.

mettamage• 10 years ago

I read the comments, some were a bit negative side about Quora introducing advertizing, others were quite positive about Quora itself and then a thought occurred. I haven't read it as explicitly as I'm about to say, but you know what the most popular startups and companies are really disrupting?

Advertizing

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Stackoverflow (a lot more niche though) are all making money with advertizing.

It's perhaps not the only way they make money, but it is always one of the first revenue sources they have, or the first even.

I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of the web app startups out there are about the same thing.

Nuances are welcome :)

wrsh072• 10 years ago

It's a bit more than just advertising, though. Facebook and Google both run ad networks. Both publishers [other websites] and advertisers can turn to either [or both] for their advertising needs.

This is also why Snapchat has a billion dollar valuation [see how many views they send Buzzfeed http://www.businessinsider.com/buzzfeed-gets-21-of-its-traff...]

eric_h• 10 years ago

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Stackoverflow (a lot more niche though) are all making money with advertising.

Having spoken with some people who work at stack exchange in NYC, my understanding is that it's the jobs site that is their biggest revenue bet, not advertising.

titzer• 10 years ago

Quora has always given me a creepy feeling of a walled garden for information that has no business being in a walled garden. Facebook locks up social graphs, events between friends, relationships, birthdays? NBD imho. But trying to corner a knowledge market in a closed way is a really anti-web kind of thing to do.

amelius• 10 years ago

Then how do you feel about Stackoverflow?

johnloeber• 10 years ago

StackOverflow and the StackExchange network are completely free to read and accessible without a login. The SE sites don't require anything but an e-mail to sign up and allow you to participate pseudonymously. When using the SE sites, the feeling of it being a community effort is a fairly clear one, I think.

Quora, by its nature of focusing on the real-world reputation of its users, is much more aggressive regarding personal information, and does not feel like a community effort to the same extent (you can't edit other people's answers, etc.).

askldfhjkasfhd• 10 years ago

That they're awesome because they release data dumps of their answers for anyone to download? IIRC, this has even caused them problems -- 3rd parties were downloading their data and out-SEOing them for the same content. (I believe google put in a manual boost to SE sites in the results due to this.)

Udik• 10 years ago

What totally pisses me off about Quora is their real name policy. I am blessed with a fairly rare name- surname combination, and I definitely don't want to give to anybody with google and a couple of hours of spare time the chance to build a complete record of my (possibly ever changing) interests, opinions and life anecdotes. Also the reason I use facebook as little as possible - never, basically. I just can't believe how others can be so fond of carving in stone and committing to eternity the result of their idle time and their fleeting thoughts about anything from food to politics to world peace, all carefully labelled and tagged for later retrieval and collection.

tjmaglio• 10 years ago

0. Create fake Facebook account where you live in a foreign place, have pedestrian interests, and so on. 1. Use it to log into Quora and other sites that accept FB

borplk2• 10 years ago

Ah changing the world here we go.

A lot of Quora answers look like this nowadays:

  By Johnny Johnson - Chief Ninja Growth Hacker at SaaS HQ

  Disclaimer: I work at hip SaaS business.

  { fluff about how there are multiple choices and everyone is friends with each other }

  { pitch, keyword SEO and links }

  { pretend you are oh so genuine }

sparkzilla• 10 years ago

A while back I wrote an article [1] saying that there was no advertising on Quora because that would mean that the founders would have to accept more realistic valuations for their business, and at that time it seemed they were happy to bring investors on using the "greater fool" theory. However, as Russ Hanneman [1] says: "If you show revenue people will ask how much and it will never be enough". So the question now is: will the introduction of ads harm Quora's valuation?

[1] http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-combinator/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

radiolysis• 10 years ago

Sure there are some spam and useless answers, but there are experienced users as well who contributing with great answers.

Everyone good on Quora is going to get "Church'd" soon enough. The moderators have done everything they can to drive out quality. The ban of Michael O. Church (who was a moderate, thoughtful member of that community, regardless of his divisive presence here) convinced me of that.

I also find it interesting that any Indian or Chinese woman with feminist views that would be considered moderate in the U.S. gets reported as a sock puppet and banned.

dang• 10 years ago

Sockpuppet accounts are not welcome here. We've asked you before to stop doing this.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542395 and marked it off-topic.

nickpsecurity3• 10 years ago

I'm curious of how many of those 50 million visits are people like me who click on the links hoping for instant information occasionally or accidentally if it's top result but then leave because it's Quora. Then we go to StackExchange or some other Google result.

I'd like to see page views from logged-in members and number of active users instead of general hits. I think that would give us a more honest picture of its uptake. Anyone have that information?

takno• 10 years ago

I don't remember quora coming up in search results for me recently at all. I kind of assumed they were dying. Seems not

vessenes• 10 years ago

So much dislike for Quora! I love it. Well, I don't love it, but I have noticed recently that it's the only site that I actually click through on their e-mail marketing. They put serious energy into their targeted marketing software. So, from a marketer's perspective, I double love it.

Adam D'Angelo has to be one of the smartest people I've ever met, and there is a lot of very interesting content on Quora; I rarely read just one Q/A thread when I end up on the site.

As compared to a site that mostly shows friends pictures of people's lunch, I propose it provides useful and useable content, and is an interesting service.

sireat• 10 years ago

The answers on quora are generally well reasoned, but the questions themselves..

"What is it like to get 1600 on SAT?", "What it is like to make a million trading?","I am making $200k a year, should I buy a Porsche?", "What are best life changing habits of winners?". "What is it like to be born in a billionare family?"

Those are all real questions or very similar to real questions on Quora. For some reason Quora thinks these are the type of questions I want to read the answers to. I am a sucker for responding sometimes while cringing.

These are the type of questions I might have asked when I was 17 and maybe that is the answer to who is asking them.

zem• 10 years ago

the correct comparison is to yahoo answers, rather than stack overflow. it holds up pretty well if you consider it in that light (or used to; i stopped going there when they started insisting you log in to see anything).

Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

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