How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You brought in $20 million worth of revenue through Answers.com. What strategic reengineering did you do to the property to get it to the next level?

David Karandish: The previous team at Answers.com was doing very little optimization and split testing. For those who aren’t familiar with this, split testing is where you create a version of the page, create a duplicate version with one or two slight changes, and then you throw 1% of your traffic at that. They were doing an A/B test where they had the default version of the site; they had another version of the site that they wanted to run, and they’d run one or two, maybe three of those at a time. We came in and with our technology, we were able to vastly improve that to where now we’re running thousands of split-tests every single month, all in real-time.

There are very few good ideas or bad ideas. There are ideas we can test and gather data on, and there are ideas that are hard to test. So for us, if we’re going to be this community-driven, “voice of the customer” wiki site and get to where we need to be, we’ve got to go run a bunch of tests and figure out what the right experience looks like. That was the first thing that we did at the new Answers.com.

The second big thing that we did was implement a voting system. One of my biggest goals when we got the site was to take our best questions and answers, put them on the home page, make them featured and make it really easy to find those. I wanted to take our worst questions and answers and either improve them, get rid of them, or figure out a way to make them not as prominent. We implemented a voting system where users can vote on the quality of the questions and answers and that voting data feeds into our algorithms around what questions and answers show up. It feeds into what appears on search. It’s really driving the entire experience.

In the last couple of years here, we’ve had over 80 million people vote on our questions and answers, even though the voting hasn’t been around for all that long. The two biggest things that we did to Answers.com were optimization and voting.

I’d say the third one is the implementation of social. We added Facebook Connect. You can now sign in with Facebook, Google+, or Twitter, and we’re tying these questions and answers back to your profile, which allows us to personalize the website based on what your interests are.

If you’re interested in tennis and you like tennis on Facebook, we can show you questions and answers about tennis, as an example. If you really like the movie The Godfather and you’re an expert in that movie, you could go answer questions in that particular category. In a very short period of time, we’ve made the Answers.com website more social, personalized, and improved the content quality.

Sramana Mitra: Was the revenue that the site was generating all from advertising?

David Karandish: Up until 2012, 100% of our revenue was advertising revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Did you have your own ad salesforce, or were you using ad networks?

David Karandish: We didn’t have our own direct ad sales until 2013.

Sramana Mitra: So until 2013, you were using ad networks to monetize?

David Karandish: Correct.

This segment is part 4 in the series : How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish
1 2 3 4 5 6 7