What site has jumped five spots between August and September to become the 13th most visited site in the US, leapfrogging properties like New York Times and Viacom Digital?
Here are some hints: It’s listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?
The answer is—Answers.com.
Exemplifying that startups are long hauls, Answers.com, née GuruNet, has been plugging away since its founding in 1999. Ten years later, comScore’s September 2009 data places the reference and Q&A site as the 13th most popular site in the United States, pulling in 56.4M unique users. This is a whopping 25% increase on Answers.com’s August numbers.
I had a chance to speak to CEO Bob Rosenschein this morning, who attributes the increase to a few factors. First, there’s seasonality. Answers.com is familiar with a traffic surge that typically comes this time of year as a result of students getting back to school.
Second, Answers.com has chosen to integrate with comScore using Hybrid Measurement, a combination of server side and census measurement. This may have a real impact because sites that have chosen not to integrate in a similar manner may actually be detrimentally affected by comScore’s ability to gain better metric data from sites that have gone ahead with the integration. This means that comScore’s numbers can be off, but there’s nothing new under the sun here.
The third reason is a bit more interesting as it sheds light on a little known fact. Answers.com consolidated WikiAnswers—its user generated Q&A—site into the Answers.com domain, thereby capitalizing on the aggregated traffic. What’s interesting through is that WikiAnswers is on a tear, with 5.6M answers submitted by some 3.6M registered members. While attention to Q&A products/sites of late has focused on the likes of Vark and Hunch, WikiAnswers has just surpassed the 400-pound Q&A gorilla known as Yahoo! Answers, becoming the leading Q&A site on the web. Bet you didn’t know that.
In 2010 Answers.com will be placing particular emphasis on extending its products into the mobile and social networking arenas. We’ll have to wait and see if these catapult the company’s traffic up even further.
Whenever I search for anything and a wiki.answers.com result comes up, it is total crap. Usually it is empty. I have actively thought about how useless answers.com is before. This company cannot be doing well because it is a good product, that’s for sure.
But you visited the page before you determined it was crap, and your visit was counted. So the problem may be this site’s pages appearing in SERPs too often.
Nice attention to details Roi. The big question here, I think, is #2. Can working with comScore affect the results so much? If so, I’m stopping using comScore this moment – if a service can start using them just to get PR, what’s the point?
Do you know when the aggregation of wikiAnswers took place?
And the company just raised $7 million a few months ago. Congrats to Bob and the rest of the team!
Congrats to the team on proving that good ideas and dedication win the race! Keep going strong!
“13th most visited site in the US” Wow very nice place to be…
Demand Media is +6 spots… they are using hybrid measurement too.
And the fact its the default definition provider for Google search results…
What is this chart supposed to say? The two lines are exactly inversely correlated, which I surmise means that “100%” here equals the sum of *only* the traffic from WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers, not their traffic within the larger “answers” category.
Thus this chart *may* be leaving out traffic going to other answers sites (like the two listed) or an increase or decline in the category generally. If so, that’s kind of misleading, or at least confusing. Can you check the data?
Woo-Hoo Answers.com! Follow ‘em on Twitter: @AnswersDotCom
Could it be that the traffic has been there for a while now but since they’re now reporting more accurate data?
I like what you said: “startups are long hauls”
In September this 10 year old startup presented at Demo in San Diego. http://www.demo...all/186063.html (Minor bump in traffic in relation to 56.4M, but still something I’m sure)
Met them there. Surprising traffic, but they are out there working hard.
Back to school traffic? NOT a big surprise right?
Answers.com is a spam cesspool.
I’m sorry but answers.com isn’t really that great… neither is Yahoo Answers… they both suck.
I still can’t believe it, where is Twitter anyway and MySpace doesn’t even exist in Top 10 for US netizens, I agree @Lior Sion for pointing out the PR reason
How come yahoo are doing it all wrong?
Ahhh… May be because all their developers are in other places.
This is a PR for answers.com as you all know Techcrunch always boosts anything that is related to Israel.
I just compared Answers.com results to yahoo answers and its crap. Please try it for yourself
I prefer Yahoo Answers as well as Google seems to at this time. But the increase in interest is quite compelling.
I love WikiAnswers. The wiki format allows answers to get better over time and there are less nonsense answers to sort through. I find myself sorting through piles of garbage on the other sites in order to get a good answer. At least on WikiAnswers those bad answers can be removed or improved upon until eventually you get one good answer.
I agree with Ken, although I’m not an objective observer.
I originally created WikiAnswers in 2002 with the name FAQ Farm. This name emphasizes that it’s a site for growing questions and answers. It’s a dynamic, organic process that’s never finished. Every user is part of the process. If you don’t like the answer you find, or the question is badly worded or categorized, you can improve it. It’s true multi-user collaboration.
On other Q&A sites it’s more like a transaction. You ask a question. Someone answers your question. This often produces better answers in the short-term. I think this is because answerers know they get full “credit” for what they write. People like being the one who answers a question.
The wiki model often fails for the original person who asks a question. It’s not ideal for producing quick answers. Instead, its focus is on the long-term. It’s about the people who have the same question in the future. It’s about FAQ farming.
This also helps explain WikiAnswers’ success. For a variety of reasons, Google likes organic FAQs.
Congratulations to Answers.com!