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Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

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Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#21

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...

What about discourse?

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#23
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.

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#24
post #19

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

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.

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

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#25
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 :)

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#26

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.

>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.

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#27

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

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...

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#28

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 Stac…

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

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#29

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 Stac…

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.

Re: Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising

#30
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.
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