I have a q&a site with 4 million visitors a month - an ESL learning site. We have 2 employees, total cost <1 million :D - 1 million, even saying that makes me laugh. Completely coded by us from the ground up. This says https://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ they have only a million visitors a month??? - I'm guessing that must be wrong.
My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?
I've wondered along these lines too. There is clearly something else going on in the VC business beyond strictly evaluating company value based on ability to generate it directly. One factor I'll project (since I can't tell where you're based) is that companies with proven engineering staff in the Bay Area get a boost in inherent value just from acquihire potential. Bonus points for famous and connected founders, as Quora has.
Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch.
That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.
I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm>
On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.
Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.
Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).
It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
As an aside, I am delighted that there are 4 million people learning English from somebody who uses the phrase "pickled fucks". They are, and I mean this sincerely, in very good hands.
Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules.
Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract).
I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)
First off, Compete.com is a JOKE (I've regularly seen it off by 10-100x). Second, investors care about growth more than traffic-- do we have any data on Quora's growth? Third, Quora's founder/team is pretty bankable-- a failure scenario for them is an $80M acqui-hire. Assuming preferred shares or liquidation prefs by the new investors, that almost entirely de-risks this investment. That coupled with their long term ambition (supplant Wikipedia?) makes this a non-terrible bet.
Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult.
My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.
I also don't understand the 80million (perhaps rich people don't know where to put their money?).
But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site.
First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...).
Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.
Great tech people often make mediocre or bad investments, or invest in things that are not really worth their time in the end. Things like, Max Levchin creating slide.
It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.
if it were anywhere else in the world, we'd immediately be calling it out for exactly what it is: barefaced corruption amongst the incestuous VCs. But since the Valley has convinced many that it's the meritocratic mecca for formerly maligned nerds, we scratch our heads trying to preserve that image while the truth lies right in front of you.
Can someone explain how there a place for Quora? The only niche I can think of is generic technical advise.
Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions.
Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously.
So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.
From personal experience, Quora started off really hot. Many influential tech people were answering very basic questions with highly impactful answers. It really was an honest look into how some great minds think. Peer voting really separated the noise and allowed smart contributors to rise up through the answers.
And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context.
And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs.
So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.
Quora seems to have taken a strange turn recently - their email digest is full of creepy racial questions like "do white girls find Indian men disgusting?" and "do Asian men mind if Asian girls date white men?"
I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)
The digest seems to be custom created based on topics that you follow. If you decided to follow the generic "Relationships" topic, you'll end up with things like that in your digest. I'd guess questions like those attract a lot of controversy, so they will have a lot of voting and answers, which their algorithms may decide indicate that it is a topic people would be interested in.
I just scanned some updates in my inbox and none had anything like this. What's going on is that these updates are custom for each user, so either you haven't used the site and are getting the least common denominator, or for some reason you've lead Quora to believe that you're interested in such questions.
Am I the only one that suspects Quora's future is more likely to be similar to an About.com (to be sold off for $300m in the future when a great business fails to materialize) than a Wikipedia? It seems like they latched on to the Q&A space originally when it was hot, and are now pivoting because competing with Answers.com et al. has a lot less of a runway than they previously expected.
I had a content site from January 2011 until September 2013. From the first day until June 2013 I had less than 100 sign ups. Then I forced people to enter their email before the opaque screen is removed to allow click-through. The result: 8000+ emails from June to September..... Then I accidentally deleted my database (without backup).
Depends on the economics of your business. It could be more profitable to lose some of the easily annoyed if you can get the rest to come back on a more regular basis via email contact.
But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
>Founded in 2009 by former Facebook engineers, Quora is a revenue-less, question-and-answer service with 500,000 topics and an unknown number of users.
>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.
How could this possibly end well for the investors?
"Quora launched full text search of questions and answers on its website on March 20, 2013, and extended the feature to mobile devices in late May 2013. It also announced in May 2013 that all its metrics had grown 3X relative to the same time last year." [1]
Wasn't there some sort of issue where they were mining user data without our consent? Many of us were having to send emails directly to Quora support requesting that our accounts be deleted.
Jesus Christ Silicon Valley[1] did a beautiful breakdown of the lunacy of Quora a year ago.
JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points
"Quora has raised $61 million dollars for this life-altering
question-and-answer-cum-blogging site. Let’s break that down
a bit: SpaceX, a company that sends rockets into motherfucking
space, has raised $230 million and employs more than 3000 people
(source: the world’s second-best source for knowledge). Quora,
which lets you ask other people questions on the computer, has
raised more than a quarter of that amount and employs 50
individuals."
My experience with Quora has been pretty bad, but that has mostly to do with my topic selection and network being Indian.
Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India.
However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India.
EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation?
EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.
That's basically what I'm thinking. The demographic is becoming more and more Indian, which drives away Westerners, who are the people Quora can make money on.
My Quora experience has been a sad one. I created an account just to be able to see answers to a question I was interested in. Then I tried to delete my account and their account removal policy stated that you have to send them an email for them to delete your account. Really, who still does that in 2014.
What would happen if we valued forums the way we value tech sites? What would SomethingAwful's valuation be in today's tech world when it had the engagement and content creation power it held in the early 2000s ?
To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.
Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.
[+] [-] hitchhiker999|12 years ago|reply
My question: What in pickled f*s are these people doing with 80 million on a Q&A site? How far out of the reach of reality is this industry?
[+] [-] fidotron|12 years ago|reply
Bay Area VC activity looks a lot like Wall Street to me, with the same disconnect between price and value happening.
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
I was a Quora Top Writer in 2012 and 2013, and I've also built a lot of web stuff and spent a lot of time studying web communities. Purely from a craftsmanship perspective, they've done an incredible job. The visual design, the interaction design, the writing and reading experiences, the social incentives, the notification system: all of it is top notch.
That said, I have never understood what their economic plan is. I have a very good understanding of the economics of content businesses, and the people at Quora are either incredible geniuses or totally nuts. Since they won't say how they plan to make money, we can't say. If I had to bet, It be "totally nuts", just because so many content businesses get seduced by a creative vision that current revenue streams just can't support. But having met some of them, I know they're very smart, so I am hoping that I am wrong and that they have some clever monetization strategy that will let them justify their very large valuation.
[+] [-] not_paul_graham|12 years ago|reply
On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.
Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.
Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).
It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smirnoff|12 years ago|reply
Most likely this huge investment is a way for investors to get their money from their previous investment, which might be locked up due to some contract rules.
Basically, in order to free their funds (or avoid taxation) from their first investment (let's say from some portfolio company of Benchmark/or other participated investors), they will transfer funds from the big company to the small company aka Quora (in which these investors got a better contract).
I am not going to be surprised if Quora gets acquired from the bigger company, which happens to have the same investors ;)
[+] [-] webwright|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixQuarks|12 years ago|reply
Second, there is no way Quora only gets 1.5 million visitors per month. They have an Alexa ranking in the 400s. Yes, the tech audience skews this, but even a tech-heavy audience can't skew it that badly. Getting in the top 500 of Alexa is very, very difficult.
My guess is that they get at least 10 million visitors per month.
[+] [-] RivieraKid|12 years ago|reply
But Quora is definitely not just another Q&A site.
First, they have incredibly good technology. I would say that their livenode/webnode2 framework is one of the (or the) most technologically advanced web frameworks in existence. (Although now that React exists, it should be relatively easy to create something even better than what Quora has.) Also, I like their deployment process - they auto-deploy on every commit if tests run flawlessly. And their CEO is pretty smart (http://www.quora.com/Adam-DAngelo-1/What-are-some-good-stori...).
Second, there's lot of very valuable and high quality content. I've learned a lot from Quora.
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
It's just that the amounts being available to invest are so staggering in SV compared to other places, that any movement of money will look huge in comparison. That makes news like this sound infuriatingly irrational. Also, i guess the facebook link is important.
[+] [-] ulfw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mknits|12 years ago|reply
So if americans use some otherwise popular qna website much less, they think it's foolish to spend 80 million fucking dollars on that.
Enjoy the fucking kickstarter.
[+] [-] yalogin|12 years ago|reply
Stackoverflow answers all the tech questions but they are overly pedantic to the point of ridiculous when it comes to generic tech questions.
Hackernews should have been the correct place for generic tech advise but we don't see questions of that nature here. May be as far as tech advise goes people from startups would rather write blog posts and get some credibility for their companies rather than contribute anonymously.
So how is Quora relevant or can be? On top of that they only show you one question. So that boggles my mind as to why it can become popular if its gated to begin with.
[+] [-] orky56|12 years ago|reply
And then, the content got dry. It was the same questions with relatively similar answers. The newsfeed became more about showcasing content from months or even years ago to make it look more fresh. It really became a brand recognition and marketing tool to allow individuals to answer any industry-related question with their product/service/company in the context.
And then, posts came about. It made sense that authors would want to contribute their own insights without it being an answer to an already posed question. However, new sites like Medium, Svbtle, and Posthaven are much better tools for this although they each have their own content niche. Quora has become a redundant tool where people repost their blogs.
So where does that leave Quora? They have always had an issue going past the iron curtain of Silicon Valley. It's been difficult for them to engage the average, non-techie consumer. Even if they don't care about this demographic, it will be hard for them to sustain growth among techies. They must be quickly approaching a ceiling for unique users so then they must capitalize on engagement and retention. I'm curious how they decide to go about this.
[+] [-] feintruled|12 years ago|reply
I guess you can't stop such questions being asked, but they frequently appear as the top question in the digest and thus in the subject line. I deregistered off the back of that. (Come to think of it, not sure exactly when I registered in the first place!)
[+] [-] mccr8|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seizethecheese|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balladeer|12 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.quora.com/Quora/Which-country-has-the-highest-nu...
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leobabauta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skolos|12 years ago|reply
I had an account with them, but removed it after they started showing others what questions I was reading. Does Quora still do this?
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
But yeah, that's a big bone of contention both inside and outside Quora. The people who write a lot on Quora generally hate it, because it limits their audience. The Quora management, though, believe it is strongly to their advantage. They've never published stats or even their full reasoning, but they are quite firm in their belief that their data shows it working for them.
[+] [-] Rynant|12 years ago|reply
To make this easier for myself, I use a bookmarklet with:
[1] https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better[+] [-] boobsbr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvvcxz|12 years ago|reply
>Quora has now collected more than $140 million in funding from investors.
How could this possibly end well for the investors?
EDIT - besides a FB acquisition.
[+] [-] dchuk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|12 years ago|reply
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w68v2r2a3xq4c6c/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80...
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#History
[+] [-] codezero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] username223|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allsystemsgo|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora#Privacy_concerns
[+] [-] Jedd|12 years ago|reply
JCSV's style isn't for everyone (much sarcasm, so profanity, very rude) but he/she makes some compelling points
[1] http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/48962035819/...[+] [-] rrrazdan|12 years ago|reply
Quora got popular in India because of widespread adoption in IIT circles, who by virtue of being influencers spread it across India. So much so that, I saw a statistic which said that most visits on Quora are from India.
However for me what that has meant is that a rash of new registrants have appeared who have destroyed any topic related to my alma mater and India.
EDIT - Also shouldn't this 'Indian Invasion' have had an effect on the valuation?
EDIT - I am also an Indian and mean no disrespect. But the fact is that one of the side effects of Quora getting popular so fast is that it is often the first Internet forum for many students. I know it because I have talked to them. And that ends up in usual newbie mistakes.
[+] [-] RivieraKid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|12 years ago|reply
Watch from 9:30 on. "The idea of Stack Overflow is to attract anyone who is an expert programmer and repel anyone who's not"
My prediction - Google/Facebook (someone in that arena) will buy Quora.
[+] [-] taybin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] startupranks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droogie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gagaga|12 years ago|reply
To me, Quora is really nothing more than a glorified forum.
[+] [-] m52go|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzaga41|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Im_Talking|12 years ago|reply
Do your own startup, bootstrap it, answer to no one, feel the freedom to innovate as you see fit, eliminate the politics, remain true to your own calling. Fuck the VCs... fuck'm in the ass.