What Is Quora?
Quora is a billion-dollar social media startup, funded byhundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. The rapidly growing crowdsourced Q&A platform is reliant on a strong community that provides questions, responses,and up and down votes to create, edit, and organize the growing platform.
Active users include celebrities, CEOs,and other high-profile figures. Initially, Quora had no revenue model. So how does Quora make money? Like most portals, Quora has shifted to earning money through advertisem*nts. Quorais actively courting the advertising market by strategically placing adsso that they appear as part of the content rather than acting as an overt marketing tool.
Key Takeaways
- Quora is a crowdsourced question and answer platform that is reliant on an active community for content and development.
- The Palo Alto-based social media platform was launched in 2009 but kicked into higher gear in 2014 when it received $226 million in four funding rounds from 14 investors.
- Although the company initially had no revenue model, it now makes money through advertisem*nts that are integrated within the questions and answers.
Quora'sInception and Growth
Based in Palo-Alto, Quora was launched in 2009. The development stageof Quora’s platform took approximatelynine months, and the portal gained traction as employees invited friends (who in turn invited friends of friends) to join the site.
In 2014, Quora joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator. The Q&A platform has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Peter Thiel, Tiger Global Management, Matrix Partners, Sam Altman,and others. By 2017, some estimates put the value of the company at about $2 billion.
Quora reported$20 millionin revenue in 2023, with more than 400million unique monthly visitors. The success is due largely in part to Quora's elegant user interface, its initial base of intelligent and committed participants,and its effectiveness in highlighting the most useful and interesting content personalized to individual users.
Quora's content is entirely dependent on the community it cultivates; the community generates questions and provides the answers.
Quora'sVision
Launched by founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, the creators of Quorawere on a mission to “share and grow the world’s knowledge.” The social venture'swebsitestated:
Not all knowledge can be written down, but much of that which can be, still isn't. It remains in people’s heads or only accessible if you know the right people. We want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better, and to empower everyone to share their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of the world.
Quora democratizes knowledge on a platform accessible to all, from the lay reader to Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg. The crowdsourced Q&A platform is run entirely by the user community. Users post questions such as “Could two smart computer science Ph.D.students create a search engine that unseats Google?” Users can then follow questionsand offer responses.
The Quora community finally votes onan answer, either up ordown, similar tothe popular social platform Reddit. The answers with the most upvotes are highlighted and viewed the most.
Acquisition of Parlio
Quoraacquired the political discussion platform Parlio in March 2016. The deal markedQuora's first and only acquisition to date. Political activist Wael Ghonim founded Parlio in 2014 with $1.68 million in seed funding. Ghonim, who found fame viasocial media during the Arab Spring, wantedto help readers avoid and identify bias in the media.
The acquisition of ParliohashelpedQuora continue to focus on generating quality conversations with experts and a community of enthusiastic learners.
Monetizing Content
In 2021, Quora announced a program to begin allowing its users to earn money from their content. With Quora+, users agree to a $6.99 per month subscription service (or $47.88 one-time payment for a full year) to access such paywalled content. These subscription payments will then be allocated and 95% of it distributed to content creators.
This subscription service will exist in parallel to the existing free Q&A and other content, with a business model similar to competitors like Substack and Ghost.
The Bottom Line
The heart of Quora is questions—questions that spark interest, questions that have the power to change the world, or questions that pertain to a particular user’s life. The success of Quora can be attributed to astrong and educated user community, anappealing user interface, and advanced processes that highlightthe best responses that directly benefit the usercommunity.
Ultimately, Quora has gained solidtraction amongits competitors, including Stack Overflow,Reddit, and Yahoo! Answers, which is an attraction for advertisers. However, whether the site's advertising venture becomesa detractor for its visitors remains to be seen.
