How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the timeframe that you’re describing, there was activity in the competitive landscape. Of course Quora, with a huge amount of funding, came into the picture and has since become a very large site. How do you view Quora vis-à-vis Answers.com?

David Karandish: First of all, we like to see investment into the question and answer space in general. If you look at the areas that we sit in between, you’ve got an ex-Facebook guy at Quora, you’ve got Twitter guys at Jelly and Medium, and you’ve got an ex-Huffington Post guy at BuzzFeed. If you look at the question and answer, and social and viral article space that we’re in, some of the brightest minds of some of the biggest companies in the last 10 years are now, for their next act, going into this space. So I think we picked the right category to go into.

In terms of us vs. our competitors, whether it’s Quora, Ask, or Yahoo! Answers, we took a very different approach and I think that’s leading to some great results. The first thing that we did is we said Answers is not just going to be a website; it’s going to be a platform. You’ll see our content and our questions and answers syndicated out throughout the rest of the Web. That’s something that our competitors haven’t quite figured out how to do yet.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not true; Quora does that with very large publications like Time and Forbes all the time.

David Karandish: The second thing though is that we’ve realized that the most commercial questions and answers show up on the retail sites that you want to shop at. When you have a question about something you want to buy, which is a decision-making process, we want to be there on sites like OfficeMax, where we have our questions and answers showing up. So when I talk about Answers as a platform, I’m not talking about feeding articles into newspapers. Anyone can do that. I’m talking about integrating with the biggest commerce sites of the world to help people make decisions.

The focus in what we did is we went from a site that was focused primarily on reference aggregation, which is largely what Quora and Ask do today, as well as Ask and some of these others into being more of a decision-making company where we can help people decide on what they want to buy, where they want to invest, where they want to spend time, whether they’re on Answers.com or they’re going throughout the rest of the web.

Sramana Mitra: So, you’ve focused on the e-commerce industry?

David Karandish: Yes. We’re focused on retail. The other thing is in terms of our size of registered users, Quora doesn’t publish any of their user statistics because they’re very small. Yelp also doesn’t publish any of their registered user statistics because the number of people who are registered with them is very small. From the time that we’ve owned Answers, we went from about 5 million registered users to 180 million registered users now. We have more people registering, giving us their information, and being a part of the community at Answers.com. That’s a big shift and a differentiation from many of our competitors as well.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re syndicating content to these retailers like OfficeMax, what is the business model?

David Karandish: We have a dual business model. We have advertising on Answers.com, and then we have a subscription model where we power the software in a SaaS platform for some of the biggest brands in the world. To do that, we have a combination of questions and answers, ratings and reviews, syndicated content, and customer experience analytics where we ask users questions in a survey and then use that to measure the experience that they have on that website.

This segment is part 5 in the series : How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish
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