In May, Yahoo! Answers has been shut down after helping the internet answer its hottest questions since 2005. But now Quora, which started as a question-and-answer site but has expanded to include blogging, makes its platform more attractive to creators.
Quora says it is “on track to generate positive cash flow through ads alone,” implying the platform is not currently in the dark. But Quora sees harnessing the creator and subscription economy as a way to generate profit.
“We want to make knowledge sharing more financially sustainable for creators,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in a blog post. “While there are many people who are motivated and able to spend their time writing on Quora just to share their knowledge, many more could share a lot more with a financial justification for doing so.”
Quora’s first new product is Quora + – subscribers will pay a monthly fee of $ 5 or an annual fee of $ 50 to access the content that any creator chooses to put behind a paywall. These are the same rates as Medium, which has no ads, charges for its membership program.
Rather than paying selected creators, subscribers will pay Quora. Then, each subscriber’s payment will be distributed to creators “in proportion to the amount each subscriber consumes their content, with more of a subscriber’s contribution going to the writers and spaces that the subscriber follows.” Creators have the option of enabling a dynamic paywall on Quora + content, which would give users free access to certain posts if Quora believes they are likely to convert to a paid subscription; there is also an “adaptive” paywall option, which uses an algorithm to decide whether to pay for a specific user’s content on a case-by-case basis. This is supposed to help creators strike a balance between monetizing their content and growing their audience to find new potential subscribers.
Quora told TechCrunch that it is still experimenting with Quora + and cannot yet say what percentage it will take from subscriptions.
The other option is for creators to write paid posts on Spaces, which are like user-created posts on Quora. Quora will take 5% of the subscription fee, which the creator can choose at their own discretion – comparatively, direct-to-consumer blogging platform Substack takes 10% of writers’ profits, making Quora a competitive alternative. Other platforms like Ghost charge a monthly fee of $ 9, but allow writers to keep their income – for writers earning at least $ 180 per month, Ghost would be more profitable than Quora.
“We are able to make a long-term commitment to take only a minimal amount without needing to increase it in the future, as we derive enough ad revenue to fund most of the development and operations of the platform. shape, ”D’Angelo wrote. Substack, meanwhile, has no ads.
Quora reached a valuation of $ 1.8 billion in 2017 after raising $ 85 million, and at the time, the platform had 190 million monthly users. Now, according to D’Angelo’s blog post, over 300 million people use Quora every month. Despite this growth in user numbers, Quora laid off an undisclosed number of staff at its Bay Area and New York offices in January 2020.
Space subscriptions will launch today for English-speaking users in 25 countries, including the United States. The deployment of Quora + will be less immediate, as Quora invites select editors to test the platform and determine what works best for subscribers and creators.
