The Secret Life of Quora
Quora has been the butt of internet jokes for as long as I can remember. Want an incorrect answer? Go to Quora. Giving ridiculously incorrect answers is just Quora’s thing. It’s what it does, man! Despite that, it turns out that there is an extremely large population of authors on Quora making actual money asking and answering these questions. But, does that make it a good resource?
Let’s start by taking a bird’s eye view of the internet’s most incorrect site.
Quora was founded by two Facebook alumni in 2009 although it did not become available to the public until 2010. The idea of a Q&A site where experts in their fields can answer questions from the internet public apparently seemed like a golden idea at the time, netting Quora $86M in funding. Despite having just a dribble of income from search ads, it then managed to secure another $80M in 2014 and finally started rolling out ads to make money in 2016. By the end of 2017, it was evaluated at $1.8 Billion. With a B. In 2019, it secured yet another $60M in funding making its total funding series $226M yet it only turned $20M in revenue in 2018. At 300 million unique users per month, Quora had cemented its position as the company that can’t make money. Yet, it is still here, churning out mediocre content to the masses. Why?
Quora pays questioners
An interesting quirk of Quora is that it pays people to ask questions, not to answer them. And, it only pays people it invites to its QPP (Quora Partner Program). The stated reason for paying people for good questions is this:
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.
At face value, this seems to make sense. But upon a few seconds consideration…does it? I don’t require any knowledge about literally any subject to post questions. All of us don’t know more than we know, so we all have the potential to turn into question cannons and fill the site up with inane questions. The real work, the work that takes time and experience to answer, is in the answers. And, by Quora’s own admission, it is those answers that generate the “good” content.
So, why is Quora not paying the people who are actually contributing to saleable content? Turns out that it is, just not how you’d think…
Quora encourages you to answer your own questions
I am not making this up. See?
[U]sers are encouraged to add questions that they know the answer to and then answer these questions immediately.
Let’s walk through the conflicts in this content model. Quora states that it exists for these reasons:
“We want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it”. That is two different people.
“to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better”. That is two different people.
“Quora is a place where you can ask questions you care about and get answers that are amazing.” That is more than one person.
Yet, Quora actively encourages people to answer their own questions. That doesn’t meet any of the three stated criteria – the person who both writes and answers a question doesn’t get a “connection” to anyone else, doesn’t get “brought together” with anyone else and doesn’t get an “amazing answer” that they did not already know.
This content model just adds an unnecessary step to the process of writing an article. Instead of just writing the article I want to write, I first need to ask a question that I can answer with the article. It also adds a strong incentive to write click-bait questions because that’s how authors get paid.
Quora’s moderation is opaque
Every writing site I have been a part of has this problem. There is always some sort of moderation team that makes decisions to pull articles or determine how they should be treated and none of these teams communicate to authors about their decisions. On Medium, is the “curation” team that decides whether your article is pushed in front of readers via their distribution network and the Quora moderation team “collapse” answers or removes questions and answers entirely. In theory, the reasons why Quora moderators would remove content are very clearly detailed. But, in practice, it seems that users who have had questions and answers removed are not told why.
This user wrote an answer that had over 200,00 views and 2,227 upvotes when Quora deleted it with no communication as to why. The author of the answer collectively had over 1.1M views of his content and he had attained the Quora “rank” of Most Viewed Writer in multiple categories.
Certainly, a post with thousands of upvotes and hundreds of thousands of views fits the stated purpose of providing “amazing answers”. An answer that popular would almost certainly be bringing in some kind of ad revenue. So, why did Quora kill it? No clue. Nobody will ever know.
The opaque moderation problem plagues the online writing industry. On one hand, I understand that the influx of content from the public internet every second of every day would be daunting to manage. On the other hand, that is exactly the business that sites like Quora deliberately got into, so it seems naive to fail to plan for it.
Quora doesn’t satisfy answer seekers
Alexa is a website ranking tool by, you guessed it, Amazon. This Alexa pre-dates the “tell me the weather” Alexa by decades, but I guess Bezos likes the name so much he reused it. This Alexa is the defacto internet tool to understand the traffic patterns of a website and how to hone search terms to drive traffic to that site. It contains a wealth of information not readily available anywhere else such as “site user overlap” and “site flow”. Let’s take a look at Alexa’s data for Quora.
The “site flow” data shows the sites Quora users came from, and the sites they leave for. Due to the technical way in which browsers communicate data to servers, this data can’t possibly be 100% accurate, but it’s good enough.
The most telling data point to me is the Google metric. If Quora were answering people’s questions satisfactorily, I would not expect to see a full 38% of Quora users high tailing it to Google right after visiting Quora. For the sake of argument let’s say that the 37.9% of people who went to Google after Quora are a subset of the same 49.7% of people who arrived at Quora from Google. That would mean only 10% of users found a satisfactory answer on Quora and the rest went back to Googling. That’s not exactly the level of satisfaction a Q&A site is shooting for.
The second interpretation pertains to the flow of traffic from Quora to social media sites. In all cases, more people left to go to social media sites than arrived at Quora from social media sites. We can assume that those visits to social media sites are to individual user profiles; nobody is hitting the front page of Facebook on purpose. That means Quora is more effective at funneling users to social media site pages than it is at answering questions.
This revelation adds even more incentive to write click-bait questions. If I want to drive traffic to my site, I write an article peppered with links and then I ask a question that the article addresses, post the whole thing on Quora and watch my site stats. While I think that this is a totally legitimate use of the internet, it is hardly a recipe for encouraging quality content.
Final thoughts
I wrote this article because I was surprised to discover that Quora was still around. I remember it from a decade ago, but even then it was never considered anything but the punchline to a joke. Finding out it was still around and, in fact, booming in some writers’ circles was surprising. It was then that I decided I should look at Quora more closely to find out how it could be so widely talked in author circles, yet virtually unknown in others. As we both now know, I see the reasons why.
This basic research also shows why Quora can’t get monetized properly. It is unable to deliver on its stated purpose because it is fundamentally broken in how it tries to go about it. I don’t have any suggestions to improve that – the internet is populated by millions of people trying to make a buck and they’ll be drawn en-masse to any site that purports to make that easy.
The overall problem I see with both Medium and Quora is that they state to provide a platform for meaningful, deep content, yet are not constructed in a way to actually support that. The goal on Medium is to get noticed by publications or curators and the goal on Quora is to write questions that show up in search results. Neither of those goals is consistent with good writing which is why both platforms are overflowing with articles titled “How to make money on Quora|Medium” and other content that fails to raise the bar.
my shorter content on the fediverse: https://the.mayhem.academy/@jdw