How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers?

David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So if you’re a retailer, we can work with a brand who sells products within your retail space. We can also get content from the users of your website, whether it’s feedback on your site itself, or whether it’s somebody filling out a survey and providing information on their customer experience.

When we ask users questions about their experience, we can do that on that company’s website, on their mobile website, on their mobile app, in their call centers, and in their physical stores in some cases for brick and mortar retailers.

We want to help consumers make good decisions. We want to help answer the world’s questions. We want to be the company that helps power the voice of the customer. We look at it and say we’re going to do that on Answers.com, but we’re also going to do that throughout the Web.

Sramana Mitra: What is the split in the revenue between advertising versus SaaS?

David Karandish: Approximately 50-50.

Sramana Mitra: I like the way you have built the strategy of the company because the company that you started off comparing yourself with, BuzzFeed, is really a media company. They’re not necessarily a SaaS company; I don’t see them as that at all. Do you?

David Karandish: The way I like to think about it is that we’re the best of both worlds. We’ve got the scale and the audience of a media company, but we have the platform, software, and distribution of a big SaaS company. If you look at our revenue model, we have both sides of the house—advertising and subscription—and they help benefit each other. We have folks who advertise on Answers.com, where we also power their question and answer experience, or their customer experience analytics, or their ratings and reviews.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of advertisers do you attract? Is there any type of trend or bias?

David Karandish: We reach a large demographic of the United States. We have a third of the US Internet population on our website, so anyone who advertises to consumers is a good fit for our website. Our demographics skew towards a little bit younger, which we think is good because it continues to build out that population and base. But just about any advertiser can advertise on Answers.com.

Sramana Mitra: You said you started building your own ad sales force since 2013. Specifically, what are you trying to go after with that?

David Karandish: That’s a great question. When we work with these ad networks, we get inventory that fits specific sizes and specific types of dimensions and ways to put it on the page. We’re looking at it saying we want to help these brands, advertisers, and retailers be more integrated into our experience; for example, helping brands to sponsor questions and answers on Answers.com.

We created a concept called an Answers brand page where a brand can roll up all the questions and answers that people ask about their brand on a specific page, and they can answer a question directly from the consumer. Rather than just asking the community, you could then pose your question directly to the brand.

Sramana Mitra: You’re almost serving as a customer service model.

David Karandish: Exactly. So that same content that lives on Answers.com/Brand could also then show up on Brand.com/Answers. The way to think about it in terms of our strategy is we want to be there. We want to go to you as a consumer wherever you have questions and answers. If that means you get to Answers.com, then it’s awesome. But if that means you’re on any of these top websites in the world, we want to be able to help you get an answer to your question, whether it’s what should you buy, where should you buy it, what price should you pay; whether it’s what are your perceptions about this experience, how can it improve. It’s anything from customer service, all the way to sales, all the way to ratings and reviews.

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