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What are analysts saying are the biggest opportunities for growth (product or market) within the Question and Answer website (i.e. Quora, NYT Ask Well, etc.) industry over the next 5 years?
Hello and thank you for your Wonder request on the biggest opportunities for growth within the online Question and Answer (Q&A) industry over the next 5 years. In order for Q&A platforms to succeed, questions must be interesting and relevant, and platforms have to adapt to search engine algorithm changes. The growth paths of these platforms are focused on including multimedia extensions and non-intrusive advertisements. Globalization provides an opportunity to reach new markets abroad and increase international participation in the platforms. Below, you will find a deep dive into my findings.
QUALITY OF QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
The basic requirement for a Q&A platform to operate and remain in the industry lies with the quality and relevance of questions and answers provided. Content must be constantly updated, solve users’ problems, and meet the needs of those who are on the platforms. This content must be interesting, exciting and closely connected to the industry it is intended to promote.
ORGANIC SEARCH ALGORITHM CHANGES
To ensure the success of Q&A platforms, they have to smoothly adapt to organic search algorithm changes applied by tech giants like Google and Facebook. Quora’s search preference comes from the inclusion of famous personalities and industry experts on the platform, the relevancy of topics and high user engagement in voting on answers. This ensures high user traffic and a stronger reach to increase customer base. The lack of such adjustment is what drove Answer out of the industry.
MULTIMEDIA
Making more mobile-friendly multimedia extensions to the platform’s features, ensures that Q&A platforms are more approachable and user-friendly. New entrants into the Q&A industry, as well as incumbents like Quora, have added video response tools to answer questions. Users can now answer using videos instead of just words and pictures, which comes in handy for responses that are best explained visually. Such answers receive more engagement and quality rankings. This also allows the platforms to expand into YouTube’s market.
INTEGRATION OF ADVERTISEMENTS
Advertisements have to be included to ensure sustainability and increase revenue based on traffic. Moving towards a more Google and Facebook-style growth, text advertisements are slowly being introduced into the Quora platform. Quora has also recently launched a “sponsored question advertisement” format, which TechCrunch describes as “extremely subtle and unobtrusive”. The combination of videos and advertisements add to Quora’s growth by non-intrusively reaching an audience who is genuinely interested in the subject and its related advertisements.
INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH
With more people around the world getting access to the Internet, it presents a great opportunity for the industry to extend its reach. TechCrunch reaffirms that Quora’s main growth strategy is to go international. By making Q&A platforms available in additional languages besides English, new audiences can join the platforms. In the last year, both Quora and Stack Overflow have started expanding their platforms to include other languages. Besides expanding its outreach, a global audience provides an avenue for answers from those in non-English countries, which currently is limited.
CONCLUSION
Q&A platforms are growing rapidly and adapting to meet the diverse demands of millions of its users, including multimedia extension and different language interfaces. With such a wealth of information, they are extending to utilize this wealth of information as a trend barometer, with possibilities in data analytics and machine learning.
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