Yahoo Answers is three years old this week, and it is the fifth most popular property within Yahoo after the homepage, search, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Shopping. (See the table below). According to Quantcast, it attracts 24 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. ComScore puts the number a bit higher at 33 million monthly U.S. visitors, and 154 million worldwide. It’s a pageview machine, with 1.1 billion a month worldwide.
But Yahoo has not done anything with the Yahoo Answers other than try to sell it. It still gets tons of traffic and you can get an answer to almost any question pretty much immediately, but its growth has stagnated since last April.
Yet Yahoo killed a promising project that could have made Yahoo Answers even better. It was called Answerpedia. The idea was to take the very best answers from Yahoo Answers (the top 5 or 10 percent) and institutionalize them as authoritative topic pages on their own wiki that could be edited and refined. Hence, Answerpedia (which was only ever used as the project’s codename).
In contrast to Wikipedia, Answerpedia was supposed to be a Wiki of experiential knowledge instead of historical fact. It was the place where people would go to find out things like , “What is the best way to get a reservation at a popular restaurant?” or “How do you go about planning for a kitchen remodel?”
Like many promising projects, Yahoo never let it get past the alpha stage. Maybe the next CEO will revive Answerpedia and other internal projects that never saw the light of day. (The halls of Yahoo are littered with them).
A lot of the answers on Yahoo Answers are worthless, but a small percentage are consistently brilliant. This is especially true in categories where many people have specific knowledge such as home repair, literature, finance, pets, cooking, and parenting. Yet these are also areas where search tends to fail or results are inundated with spam. Authoritative pages on these topics would get great search-engine juice and create the basis for a compelling new destination site within Yahoo as well.
If Yahoo doesn’t do this, someone else will. Already, startups are picking up the slack and experimenting with new ways to improve the core idea of a Q&A site. For instance, Mahalo Answers launched yesterday, adding virtual currency and embedding the best answers in its wiki topic pages. Wiki Answers also takes a collaborative approach to coming up with the best answer.
And what about Answerpedia? Well, for one thing, Yahoo does not own the URL. If you type in http://answerpedia.com/, it redirects you to Facebook, of all places (Update: The site now directs to a simple landing page). That might not be an issue, though, as all of Yahoo’s product use a Yahoo URL (like answerpedia.yahoo.com).
And here’s another curiosity. When I asked a question on Yahoo Answers about what it was and why it never launched, “Yahoo Products” came up a suggested category for the question. As for why it never launched, I am still waiting for an answer to that one.
Update: And we have an answer from someone who says he is one of the founding engineers of Yahoo Answers:
Answerspedia would have been more peanut butter =)
Maybe, but there is a difference between spreading yourself too thin and just sitting on the ball.
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mahalo is just a crappy idea thats never gonna get anywhere. How the hell did they get 21 million in funding? cuban must have been drunk.
It was probably because Calacanis successfully launched and sold 2 previous companies.
Ask the SEO: please do not bring up facts like I sold a company for a reported $30m in 18 months, or built a $12m a year business before that and sold it to Dow Jones.
Seriously… if you post facts than what will happen in the comments?!?!? how we will trash people if you’re gonna bring up facts….
… next thing you know you’ll start talking about the five million unique visitors we get every month!
seriously…. chill out!!!
best jcal
Ifor comment http://www.jugargame.com/
There is also the possibility that - given their finances and the prospect of being acquired - there is little motivation to invest in any project that does not return an obvious immediate ROI.
So in essence, PPCs and SEM get all the priorities, while semantic search becomes the only long term goal-oriented project worth investing in.
As an alternative to these I use AskMetaFilter. There’s a one time subscription fee of 5$ but its worth it, because it keeps out the spammers and generally retarded questions, like you get on Mahalo Answers.
Yahoo! Answers = worthless answers
Mahalo Answers = worthless answers
Answerpedia = why?
Actually, I would encourage you to look at the Answers on Mahalo Answers since launch–they are VERY high quality on average.
We are taking a zero tolerance approach to membership in Mahalo Answers. Membership is a privalage, not a right, and if you’re off topic, mean spirited or–gasp–not considered (read: intelligent) we will not allow you to participate.
We’ve removed about 1-2% of the activity in the system that I would consider either stupid, inane or not helpful. What his does is set a tone of helpfulness and camaraderie amongst the community.
We’re going to curate Mahalo Answers the same way we curate our search results. That is to say, no spam and no bad behavior. If someone wants to be a jerk or give answers like “why don’t you google it?” they can hang out on Yahoo Answers–we don’t want their page views.
Long term growth is about creating an environment for the good people–not the bad actors.
all the best,
jcal
Dear Jason,
Mahalo’s anemic growth won’t be fixed with just another ripoff.
Dave
Growth rates only matter to exit strategy pillagers. It’s big, popular, has decent content. I can’t figure out why it’s more popular than ask.metafilter, but such are the toobz. It can’t cost that much to run, why would they even make noise about it?
I own the domain and had it for a similar project like Yahoo answers. unfortunately, yahoo launched couple months before us and I didn’t pursue it further.
I just wish Yahoo tried ot integrate Yahoo Answers into its results page. So many searches don’t have sponsored results on the right - a perfect way to fill the gap. A bit like Yahoo Glue search is trying. They talk about semantic web searching a lot, and yet they’re sitting on a load of user generated information. This includes delicious.com.
That is exactly what we’re doing, and that has always been the plan with Mahalo.
Our goal is to pull together three things on a search result:
1. curated, spam-free links
2. content (i.e. our Guide Note and Fast Facts)
3. Q&A (i.e. Mahalo Answers).
take a look at the Bob Dylan page here:
http://www.mahalo.com/Bob_dylan
You can see in the questions section the following:
– What’s your favorite Bob Dylan song? (2 answers)
– Why did Bob Dylan choose to rename himself “dylan”? (1 answer)
– What is your favorite Bob Dylan cover? (5 answers)
– Who are Bob Dylan’s main influences and what Dylan songs can you hear them in? (3 answers)
Over time we’ll have hundreds of Bob Dylan questions, and we have a licenses to all the answers in Mahalo Answers. This means our production costs for our wikipedia style content is going to get greatly reduced–while we make 25% of the fees and 100% of the advertising inside of Answers.
That’s why we’re really excited about the project: it’s a win-win-win-win:
a) users get answers
b) we get content
c) the person answering gets a tip
d) we get the adverting revenue
best jcal
Whatever, man. You’re spamming this site just like I am.
Every major player (even down to us at #7) monetizes the vast majority of their answers pages through Google Adsense.
Too much long tail content, too few page views of a given question, but TONS of questions with just a few page views…at scale, you have the same problem with Q&A that search results pages do, eg, tons of pages of very light value. Add them all together, and it’s worth a lot.
If Yahoo would have done the extra subdomain, that would have nuked a portion of traffic to Yahoo Answers…do you ever see two of Yahoo’s subdomains in the top 10 of Google for a given keyword? Nope.
(this from a guy that used to work as Yahoo’s first internal SEO manager…back in 2004-2006).
That concern aside, there are two features that WikiAnswers has ahead of Yahoo Answers:
1) Dumb internet users type in yahoo.answers.com all day long, don’t think, and end up using wiki.answers.com instead which is where it redirects
2) The answers on wiki answers do get better over time, in theory, which is a nifty feature
So where does all this leave Yahoo? Well, for one, with another company endlessly poaching it’s traffic (unless Yahoo buys them, which would be the smart thing to do…but, Yahoo doesn’t make smart acquisitions, they make strategic ones).
And, for another…YPN really needs to take off & do some serious magic *before* Yahoo Answers can start clocking the same revenue per visitor that WikiAnswers, Answerbag (the #3) or we do on our question pages.
Funny you’d leave answerbag out, btw, since they’ve been around since only a month after we launched, and have been bought & sold.
“It’s a pageview machine, with 1.1 billion a month worldwide. But Yahoo has not done anything with the Yahoo Answers other than try to sell it.”
Remember, this is the same company that blew up the #1 one photo web property in the WORLD. They dropped Yahoo Photos for Flickr, but the people didn’t follow.
this is semi-related - but where does Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports offering rank in terms of popular properties within their business model?
When was the last post in Techcrunch about a new startup. All we see are funding information and some junk posts about some stupid thing !!
I wonder if this approach might benefit our recently launched TRIP Answers, a clinical Q&A repository aimed at clinicians.
I like Yahoo! answers the most.
Don’t know why Yahoo! doesn’t get it.
Bring’m the new CEO.
I Love Y! Answers!!!
I like Yahoo!
Answers is the best!!!
An interesting QnA site for pictures questions is http://www.picanswers.com it help for questions that you may have that can’t be answered with traditional QnA sites.
this is cool
http://www.quantcast.com/picanswers.com
George: who the hell runs that thing anyway? And why would any self respecting idiot use a site where you CAN’T find out who owns it???
There is no about page. Just why & how did they get coverage from mashable anyway? The site is practically dead, 12 months post launch.
“And why would any self respecting idiot use a site where you CAN’T find out who owns it???”
Are you for real? Some idiots out there probably use Facebook everyday and couldn’t care less who the founder is.
Better example would be some one using google search and dont know who the founders are and best of all search for the term “google”
A failing of Yahoo! Answers IMHO is that it doesn’t have a provision for *conversation*. Once answered, a question is closed. The perpetrator has no chance for followup. In some cases, reconnection via reposting just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Google Answers discovered that the paid model for Q&A is flawed so lotsa luck Mahula.
Why would Yahoo! want to compete with Wikipedia and Knowl? If you really think this through you can clearly see why Answerpedia is not the answer to Answers question of where to go.
“In contrast to Wikipedia, Answerpedia was supposed to be a Wiki of experiential knowledge instead of historical fact. ”
that is what wikihow / ehow already do
Right on ES, structuring answers is going to be HUGE for someone because there’s a big demand for answers in the shortest amount of time possible. It’d figure into the search nicely, returning better results for semantically challenging queries (why not throw massive data at the problem). In general, structuring online output by prosumers into easily understandable (by people, search engines and semantics) will be important for media companies looking to up the value of their existing content libraries. (My former employer MTV is the king of this. ) User-friendly and timely answerpedias, and pedias of all sorts, will proliferate, and you will be proven right in a big way.
Does anyone remember Arzoo.com? This was a Q&A business too many years back - by Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail fame) - but it shut down soon, and now Arzoo.com is a travel/ticketing site!
Anyone knows why?
Lots of folks are saying that they turn to Twitter for answers these days before even a Google search, I know I do at times. Yahoo could consider combining a Yahoo Answers type service into Twitter: realtime, crowdsourced Q&A.
Michelle,
I like that idea! and I love how twitter works “realtime crowdsourcing” it so fascinating! Okay, it’s official…I’m a social media dork.
Q&A Systems seem to be popping up everywhere, and I would be conscious of the fact that a lot of these companies are not building their own systems. There are companies and services out there that actually provide the main Q&A engine and then just customize it for the new websites that want a system like that integrated into theirs.
Lumin Creative (www.lumincreative.com) is a company that does that, with their product Lumin Answers. It basically has all of the functionality of any of these other Q&A systems and many times even more with all the widgets they build into it.