Quora's Growth Story

Launched in mid-2011, Quora has fast become one of the top sites for “knowledge” in the QnA space. Quora’s goal is to be “your best source of knowledge” and in many ways, it’s been been able to hold up to this value proposition.

It’s been almost 4 years since I joined Quora - and it has been a curiosity-invoking experience. I’ve seen numerous incremental improvements, making the product better each time. I joined Quora was because of my peers back in college days. The reason why I've sustained is because of my never-ending curiosity and because Quora never disappoints.

Focus on Quality

Since its inception, Quora has maintained razor sharp focus on providing quality content. I think that quality is a precursor to getting quantity, but quantity is not a precursor to getting quality. If that were the case, then Yahoo Answers would be improving in quality over time. You can clearly see the difference in the content quality of these sites.

Quora has moderated the questions, answers and other content really well. During its first year or so, the site was only moderated by admins and other users. With the user-base growing to millions in the recent years, it is now actively moderated by both humans and bots. "Quora Content Review" - is form of Quality Control on Quora's most critical currency - the Question. I've seen hundreds of questions become clearer or less cluttered, courtesy of "Quora Question Bot" and "Quora Content Review".

Quora glorifies good authors (answerers). It awards 'Top writer' awards each year to users who have given the most influential answers and have contributed most to the community. Recently it has added the 'Published Author' and 'Author's expertise', 'Number of views' features to the user profile. It has gamified the site for users through such incentivization.

Competitors

Some directly competing websites in the QnA space that come to mind are Yahoo Answers, Reddit, and StackExchange. Yahoo Answers has a lot of content and users, but lacks behind in content quality. Reddit has a lot more number of users compared to Quora, but it's answers are not very well thought out.

StackExchange comes close to Quora in many ways, however it is very focused on finding the "right" answer rather than the many right answers to a question. In this sense, Quora is more focused on knowledge rather than the "exact" answers. It provides the "best answers" to a question.

In my opinion, Quora beats each of these sites in content quality, but definitely lags behind in content quantity and diversity. Personally, I find the Quora site to be more user-friendly: it has no clutter due it its minimal UI and no annyoing ads (yet). My views maybe biased because I use Quora a lot and that affects how I view other QnA sites.

Slow but Steady Growth

As per some estimates, the site has >10 million registered users and around 1.2M MAUs (monthly active users). The numbers aren't very flattering considering that it's been here for more than 5 years; to say that Quora has experienced explosive growth would be an overstatement.

However, Quora's database of questions and answers has grown massively. These answers, for many reasons (including timelessness, quality, content, structure) are often at or near the top of any web search on the question or related keywords. With ever-increasing top quality content generated on Quora, the company is going to be valued higher and higher.

Despite Quora having a relatively small number of subscribers, the fact that its answers are so highly ranked on largest search engines such as Google - means that it is already the #140 most visited web site in the world, with most visitors not being pre-existing subscribers. As per compete, Quora had more than 9M visitors in April'15. Since there are an only around 1.2M subscribers, this means that Quora has a larger visitor community as compared to subscribed users.

The founding team was able to attract a lot of interesting people in tech and that attracted a lot of core tech industry users, including some high profile folks. Due the "network effects" of many smart people from tech, design, science, politics, etc, already active on Quora, it is bound to attract the masses. Its network of answerers and askers is getting stronger and valuable with each every great answer.

Challenges

Quora has gained traction over years and it is going to stay. However, its user-base is not growing fast enough. Most of the people visiting Quora are not subscribers as is evident from the metrics - 9M total unique visitors in May'15, out which only 1.2M were subscribed to the website. The company has been criticized by at different places online due to its heavy-handedness in content moderation - many a times leaving the user frustrated.

The company has already raised 3 rounds of funding with a whopping total of $160M but hasn't seen a dollar of revenue. The most obvious way to monetise would be through contextual advertising. There's no limit on the revenue generation possibilities but it will all depend on how they pivot. CEO D'Angelo has hinted that Quora will start displaying advertising from the next year.

Another concern is that Indian users now result in 35% of total traffic on Quora. India has the unique dichotomy of extremely large user numbers and extremely low monetization per user. As of now, ad based models are not so effective in India when compared to the US or even China.