Why Quora Deserves Its Unicorn Status

Ask and ye shall have the answer.

Old-timey English aside, that’s basically the premise of Quora, a content platform for Q&A, one devoted to ensuring quality questions and quality answers. Founded in 2009 by Facebook’s inaugural CTO, Adam D’Angelo, the service finished an $85 million series D that lands the company in the unicorn club for startups worth over $1 billion.

Thanks to D’Angelo’s feverish focus on producing a strong product and a high-quality community, Quora took its time building what users see today, the leading source of subjective human knowledge in existence.

In order to best leverage network effects, D’Angelo has held off on monetizing the platform, relying on funding rounds to keep the company rolling full steam ahead. This lack of monetization for the past 8 years means that Quora has been moving slow but steady, prioritizing long-term revenue over short.

Now that Quora has attained the much-vaunted unicorn status, it can move forward with monetizing and returning value to the investors.

Quora Reigns Supreme in Q&A

So how was Quora able to so handily surpass the prestige and esteem of its predecessor, Yahoo! Answers?

To begin, D’Angelo attentively refined and elevated an intelligent community that asked questions of itself and also provided thoughtful answers, instituting several quality controls on content and people. Rules and standards make or break platforms, people.

Quora originated as a tech-focused network, initially attracting a smarter user base. Unlike Yahoo! Answers where anyone with a Yahoo account could contribute to Y!A, regardless of stature.

Y!A has virtually no quality controls, allowing people to ask terribly formatted questions with many grammar and spelling errors, such as: “How can i make cupcake EASY?!?! Me very Hungry!”

Don’t believe me? Check this painful video.

The freedom to post such illegible, badly posed questions discouraged educated people with a deep knowledge on the topic from responding, lest their answers (and intellect) be associated with and likely drowned out by users and content of dubious and unsavory quality.

Why would a Michelin star Chef want to share information on how to make a cupcake? (S)he probably wouldn’t feel a compulsion to contribute.

On the other hand, Quora actively encourages people to flag unclear or poorly posed questions and answers – the site even remove those contributions not up to par. This attracted and attracts a very intelligent user base, and the users saw Quora as a place where they could not only ask questions and have them taken seriously, but also receive thoughtful, firsthand subjective wisdom.

This separates Quora from other informational sites such as Wikipedia that display secondhand objective information; the experience on Quora feels like it has a personal touch.

There’s currently a wide range of knowledgeable and renowned users contribute to Quora, from NBA athletes to politicians. Even Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, indulges in answering questions on Quora from time to time. This allows Quora a level of legitimacy and intellectual prestige that is unparalleled by other Q&A sites.

Quora also has a superior advantage to websites such as Yahoo because of its superior platform DNA. While Yahoo withers as its gets bought by Verizon for scraps, its communities and products have languished.

Meanwhile, Quora continues to grow and develop.

It connects users to the content by adding a social perspective to Q&A. Users can follow each other to track relevant Q&As and contribute to conversations that they deem relevant. In a way, imitating the feed used by Facebook, but an important feature that continues to drive engagement in the community.

Time to Make Some Dough

Now that Quora is well-established as the leading Q&A platform, it has the opportunity to monetize. One way that the company is planning to monetize is through hosting and soliciting video answers and uploads.

If someone asks about a particular kung fu move or how to tie a particular knot, communicating that over text wouldn’t be so effective, which would encourage users to post media-based responses elsewhere and link to them in the answer.

Now, with Quora hosting the video onsite, it keeps users on the page longer, boosting its SEO performance and delivering greater potential value to advertisers. The video feature is still in testing, but users in beta can upload videos directly to Quora using the app or website to answer questions with mixed media.

At this time, there are a couple younger Q&A platforms like Whale that are built around video, but Quora could certainly beat them out of the market or even acquire them to capture their networks.

Quora has been in the game for a much longer time, giving it a big edge over these smaller competitors. It’s well-known and trusted for its quality of content and user responses, a reputation earned through years of stewardship.

Getting Your Ad-tention

Thus far, Quora has been rather subtle and unobtrusive with its Sponsored Questions Ad format. From time to time, a small ad appears underneath the question being asked, showing a business name and description related to the content being asked or answered.

While the ad format is still in beta, D’Angelo claims that the results have been promising, which is a good sign for Quora’s investors.

Introducing video answers could open a gateway for advertising monetization. It would allow advertisers to reach an audience with high interest around a subject without being disruptive to the learning experience. For instance, a user is more likely to watch a 5 second advertisement on a topic relevant to the one being answered in order to view the actual content, especially if the ad content is relevant.

Quora is also ramping up a self-serve advertising tool, one that would create text-based ads that are limited in their obtrusiveness. The self-serve is ideal because it offloads the need to target and sell these ads directly and it attracts small businesses with smaller budgets who need to target very precise audiences.

Lastly, it could be favorable for Quora to target ads differently based on the value of the question being asked. For simple questions with a single answer such as, ‘How to order an Uber,’ Quora can increase the amount of advertising as the simple answer isn’t very discussion-based, giving the users more content to engage with.

For more discussion-based questions, such as ‘Which college major is most valuable,’ Quora can offer less advertisements, giving the users their full learning experience and allowing them to navigate through answers without distraction.

Quora, How Do You Plan to Grow?

If Quora continues to focus on quality, cautiously developing new products and optimizing content, then it seems to have a bright path ahead. As long as the product doesn’t overwhelm users with an enormity of ads that weaken the user experience and content’s value, Quora will continue to grow and make enough money to sustain the business.

A new sector for growth is non-English-speaking populations. D’Angelo hopes to democratize information online and increase user base by offering other languages. There is a plethora of information online in English through various blogs and forums, but not so much in other languages.

Quora launched separate sites in Spanish and French and hopes to add two new languages, German and Italian, by year’s end and add more languages steadily over the next few.

If Quora can achieve this, what is to stop people from going to Quora for simple questions as they already do in English? There has already been a shift towards asking Quora simple questions such as “How to order an Uber,” that Google search could easily respond to, but people appear to value other user’s personal responses often more.

If people are able to ask Quora their simple questions in any location or language, Quora may even be able to compete with Google as the first place people go to ask questions and search for information. This would generate revenue and increase company value by connecting more users and capturing their attention.

D’Angelo has already shown his devotion and commitment to the user experience and quality of content, making Quora the leading Q&A platform it has become today. The company seems like it’s on the right track for platform success.

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