
Quora and the Quest to Answer Every Question - jhonovich
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/quora-and-the-quest-to-answer-every-question
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sparkzilla
I wonder how much Quora paid for that fluff piece. The real question is: why
is Quora not making money _now_? Quora has been going since 2009 with zero
revenues, and has over 100 staff burning through investment money. If they
could be making money already they would, and the lack of proper metrics is
extremely suspicious.

It's highly likely that answers are not as monetizable as the company thinks.
If they were, they'd be doing it already. I also think that founders that try
to get rich off of the free labor of contributors have no future. I wrote an
analysis of this company a while back, but it still stands:
[http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-
combinator/](http://newslines.org/blog/why-quora-joined-y-combinator/)

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al2o3cr
"That’s because Quora needs at least a few data points if it’s going to offer
a good set of content to new users and keep them interested, instead of
confused, as to what the purpose of the site is."

Oh, I think the "you must log in or else we'll hide the answers" establishes
quite clearly what the purpose of the site is - and since that purpose is
"monetize the ever-loving bejeebus out of people writing answers for free",
that's why I close the tab when I hit a Quora result...

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joelthelion
It's also what's going to kill the site. Which is a pitty, because it fits a
good niche, between Stack Exchange which needlessly restricts the questions
that can be asked, and Yahoo Answers which is just too low quality.

Personnal message to the HN crowd: if you start a Quora clone that is more
open, quite a few people might switch. I think I would, if the site works well
enough.

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jobvandervoort
What will kill the site exactly? I don't see that many problems with
advertisement as a monetization strategy. That has worked well for Google,
Facebook, etc.

I struggle to think of an alternative method of scaling something like this,
other than donations (Wikipedia). If you want to target everyone, ads are your
best bet.

edit: the point is having to log in, rather than the advertisement, that'll
kill the site.

I'm not sure about that choice either, but similar arguments apply.

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programminggeek
I am guessing the reason they aren't putting ads on Quora yet it would limit
their ability to raise money. Uncertainty drives the theoretical value higher
because while the average CPM on ads might be say $10, they can project
because of their higher quality content that they will be able to charge $25
or $50 CPM or something like that. So, they can sell projections and vanity
metrics instead of actual revenue to investors.

Also, not having ads means they are totally product focused, not focused on ad
sales and driving up their ad rates. That helps them keep their team small so
they don't burn through money hiring to build up and sell their own
advertising system.

Last, not putting ads on their site insulates them from the ups and downs of
the advertising market. If ad prices drop one quarter, their future
projections have to change a lot because of the real numbers.

Long story short, I don't think if Quora put AdSense on their site that they
would have been able to raise $161 million dollars.

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jhonovich
Does Quora generate any revenue at all?

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thomasfoster96
Nil, but ads are pretty much guaranteed to arrive during 2015.

