When Jimmy Wales & co earlier this year quietly added Wikianswers to the host of products launched under the Wikia umbrella, we weren’t the only ones who were skeptical about its potential to make waves. Did the Internet really need yet another Q&A site, we wondered?
We already have dozens of those, including popular sites like WikiAnswers.com (not affiliated with the Wikia service but with a terribly confusing name resemblance), Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers (anyone else spotting a naming pattern?) and a plethora of similar services. Wikia thought there was room for one more regardless and was going to try and make a difference by focusing on an open, freely licensed community where copyright remains with the user who submits the content at all times.
And unlike Wikia Search, the startup’s disappointing attempt at creating a crowd-sourced search engine experience that was shut down by the company a couple of months ago, Wikianswers seems to have gotten a bit of traction with that strategy. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina tells us Wikianswers recently hit some significant milestones: the site apparently now boasts 200,000 questions of which 50,000 are answered, and it’s generating a healthy 1 million page views per month.
Granted, this is still a far cry from the traffic some of its more established competitors are seeing – comScore pegs WikiAnswers.com at 79 million monthly page views in the U.S. alone and Yahoo! Answers at 4x that, for example – but Wikia of course only launched its Q&A service about half a year ago.
Much too early to tell if Wikianswers will prove to be a winner for the company, but the current milestones suggest its future may at the very least be a lot brighter than the ill-fated Wikia Search service ever was.
What traffic does mahalo get?
According to comScore, about 4MM page views per month.
Nice!
thought the stats are impressive but i still doubt that it would some sort of a break through primarily because this model is already present for sooo long… wikianswers is nothing new.
true many answer sites, same answers, same stuff!
True.
Good show. One is wiki brand. And another is searching people often enter the whole question into search engine, any guess the perfect phrase match..
As from screenshot ‘related questions’ section is missing, which is vital for seo. And maybe multiple answers for single question..
I think all Q&A sites are doomed in this twitter era….. But that’s just my opinion….
“Wikia CEO Gil Penchina tells us Wikianswers… (is) generating a healthy 1 million page views per month. ”
“comScore pegs WikiAnswers.com at 79 million monthly page views in the U.S. alone”
So is it 1MM or 79MM page views? That’s a HUGE difference.
See what I mean with terribly confusing name resemblance? There’s Wikianswers and there’s WikiAnswers.com. Sooner or later one of them will have to claim that name.
Yes – see the column I wrote about this very issue of the name confusion:
“What’s in a name? Everything, when you’re talking wiki value”
http://www.guar...i-answers-wikia
Since I wrote that, the Answers.com’s “WikiAnswers” site has obtained a US trademark registration on “WIKIANSWERS” (#77138017)
Does this come as an extension for mediawiki?
HubPages also has a Q&A service:
http://hubpages...answers/latest/
You are soooooo wrong. And the statistics/traffic demonstrate that – and yet you still feel malign Q&A.
The truth is that Q&A is fundamental to the web in that most of what people are doing is asking and answering questions – and the Q&A structure provides an obvious way to do that.
Yes Twitter will be helpful for Q&A and destination sites will be good and so will all the other iterations. There will only be more and more as there should be.
I could not be more biased since my company provides white label Q&A for media and corporate web sites.
But think of it this way. A web site is largely designed to anticipate the questions a visitor would have and answer them in market speak. They typically have an FAQ section as well.
But those FAQs are rarely related to the questions users have asked and are almost never updated.
And the weirdest thing: a visitor can’t go to a web site and ask a question! How weird is that?
Q&A, like most things, will get more local, more specific to applications and communities and will grow like wildfire. We have yet to see the true growth of Q&A.
Thanks for letting me rant.
Wikianswers user experience BLOWS. Come on, can’t you afford a UI person and a graphic artist?
Seriously, even if no graphic artist, THINK for a second. You have competition. Don’t make the UI confusing for people.
USER:14.23.123.4.
what the hell? why should i ever see something like that?
Come on Jimmy, this is website design 101.
Get one right and you’re lucky. Do it again and you’re good.
He’s actually already created two popular websites. Wikia.com is popular, and he’s completely cornered the “nice wiki” market.
I meant “niche wiki”
Does anybody know if their answers engine is open-source same way as wikipedia is?
Robin, how much were you paid to vomit up this puff piece? Seriously? 75% of the questions serve no useful purpose for visitors, because they’re not answered? Less than 1.3% the page traffic of its nearest (and better) competitor?
And you’re going to kid us that this is some kind of “brighter future”?