Quora, one of the web’s favourite question and answer services, is ready to start making money. Founded in 2009, the site has pretty much been surviving off investment capital for the past few years.
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Come next year though, it’ll tread down the path worn by so many social services before it and start including ads. In an interview with the New York Times’ Bits blog though, founders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever (the two were early Facebook employees) revealed what they believe to be the service’s secret weapon.
You see, while the average post on a social network tends to fall off people’s radars pretty quickly, the majority of activity around a Quora post happens up to a month after it’s been posted.
The folks at Quora call this “evergreen” traffic and they hope it’ll save Quora from a lot of the problems faced by sites running on ad revenue.
“Eighty percent of our views happen a month after an answer is written,” D’Angelo told the Times.
“The real value is in the 90% of questions that aren’t about what will happen next week,” Marc Bodnick, the company’s head of business and community said. “Our traffic is evergreen.”
It’s unclear, at this stage, what the user reaction to Quora running ads in its answers will be or what guarantees it plans to put in place to ensure that its answers aren’t compromised by ads.
