Yahoo! Answers launches Ask the Planet campaign
Marshall Kirkpatrick
57 comments »
Yahoo! Answers unveiled a new promotion today called “Ask the Planet,” where celebrities, notables and allegedly interesting people will pose questions that users will answer for a chance to win prizes. The celebrity line up is high-profile and should garner a lot of attention.
Questions will be posed to users by the following:
- Marilyn vos Savant, the holder of world’s highest IQ, begins the promotion today with a question about the best way to help kids in school.
- Friday through Sunday will be your chance to answer a question from Donald Trump, in exchange for a $5,000 spending account.
- CNBC’s finance guru Suze Orman’s prize is 3 oz of pure gold.
- Click and Clack, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR’s Car Talk will participate. The prize for their question is free gas for a year. And all you get for Donald Trump’s question is $5,000!
- Arrianna Huffington will pose a query about News and Events, the winner will get a trip for two to DC. Thrilling.
- Al Gore’s question is tied to a free 2006 Prius.
- Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.
- Bono will close the event and Yahoo! will donate $25k to his One campaign in honor of the winner.
It’s called Ask The Planet, but the company claims that it is legally prohibited from give prizes to anyone outside the US. That’s liable to raise some ire. In fact, for having a name like that, the campaign seems pretty US centered. Likewise, in the spirit of mass page views - I mean scientific inquiry, it appears that the winners will be selected at random and users are encouraged to offer more replies for greater chances to win. The company plans to plaster ads for the campaign all over the US. None the less, looks like an interesting campaign that’s liable to raise the profile of Yahoo! Answers significantly. Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems? Call me cynical, but I’m not sure it is.
“Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems?”
No, I think not… But I wouldn’t mind winning any of those prizes, So I for one will be answering as best I can to any of the questions! Money, Gold, Free Gas, New Car, Smithsonian … all are well worth a few minutes of my time.
Click and Clack from NPR will be on there? Nice.
Cut and paste press release.
Probably they plan on expanding this later to other countries as well and hence the “Planet”.
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This is an extremely clever promotional idea that, with all the attention that it’d probably get, have a great impact in driving users to this new world of user-generated sites. Good for yahoo!
Jimbo, I’m sorry that you feel that way but the press release actually has far fewer details than this on the celebs participating etc.
that’s silly to call it ask the planet, but then limiting it (in some way or other) only to us.
US residents only. Very poor indeed, like this is the *world-wide* web.
So much for ask the *planet*.
Extract from rules follows:
“No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Open to U.S. residents, 18 or older. See official rules.”
Noone outside the US good enough eh?
At first I was really skectipcal (sp) about Yahoo Answers, but ironically enough I find myself going to it each day and answering questions. It is actually pretty fun. I only wish there was a mechnaisme where you could flag spam questions or stupid ones.
Nitpick: I believe Marilyn vos Savant has the *highest* IQ, not the “largest”
Thanks Paul, you’re a pretty smart cookie yourself.
I think a skill based game would be a better idea, maybe not attract as many people to play, but you would get better answers. For example, the donald chooses what he thought was the best answer versus picking out of a hat.
Just heard an advertisement for this feature on the Jim Rome show.
It is pretty interesting how Yahoo uses Radio ads and famous personalities to push some of its new initiatives, while Google depends on the techies spreading the word.
I can’t wait until the movie stars and athletes start asking questions and then turn around and use it as their own idea!
Is it realistic to find a single best answer to any of these high profile questions? It seems that if someone could come up with an answer in 3 sentences, than someone else would have put that idea into action long ago.
But hey, I’m a sucker for free stuff too.
Just another trick to popularise their web site. It is not only fun to answer questions on their site, you actually get a lot of useful good answers in the archive for some of our day to day questions.
There is a mechanism to flag questions. Hit the “report abuse” link on any question page to flag the question for review.
who reads the thousands of answsers? lol
is this stuff being shown on tv anyone know?
im watching some live feed which is pretty
cool but i don’t see what it has to do with
the asking questions stuff
Presumably this is the same ‘Planet’ that you use for the ‘World Series’.
That is a very cool marketing promotion. Yahoo! seems to have been creating lots of hype lately… something Google has been lacking in for a very long time (atleast in hype that they’ve created and not the users speculating about something).
This is amazing! I have been using the latest build, and this is the best browser ever. The photo integration is beautiful.
the logo thing looks so rough.. not very Yahoo-like
Hopefully, besides an interesting contest of Q&A some great ideas will result that could open some minds and promote a better world or new way to approach some issues that complicate our world.
Let’s do it!
We can “Ask the Planet” but we only care about what US users have to say. This is somewhat like calling a game between two US baseball teams the “world’ series….
It looks like you can only answer one question once. When encouraging multiple submissions, they probably mean that they want people to answer the various questions, not the same one multiple times.
A glance or an answer from Stephan Hawking is worth more than all the prizes mentioned for all celebrites in this article.
“Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.”
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