How Quora makes money
Quora starts with a Q and ends with an A which is appropiate, as this is basically a questions and answers site. How does Quora make money?
Quora is well organized, properly built, and it's one of the largest databases of questions and answers out there.
Quora is a huge site, but in the end it's just a Q&A site. What separates this site from almost all other Q&A site is the sheer amount of visitors, thanks to a relatively small number of committed users who supply the site with quality answers.
The site was launched in the late summer of 2010, and is today one of the largest on the web, in fact one of the 100 most popular according to Alexa rank.
How does Quora make money?
Quora makes money from contextual advertising. Ads are shown to non-subscribers and some users, and even then they do not flood their pages with ads. Top writers are not exposed to ads at all.
In short, the Quora website makes money from:
- contextual advertising
The founders and owners may also experience the pay day of their life if the company ever does an IPO or get acquired. Site owners may add this to the future earning potential:
- Initial Public Offerings
- Acquisition
How much money do Quora make?
Quora is a private company, and we couldn't find any information on how much they are actually making.
We have no idea how much money Quora actually makes. We could run the numbers, do an estimate, and make a qualified guess, but we won't.
The fact that it was valued at $1.8 billion back in 2017 suggests that there is significant earning potential, although little can be said about how much money they are currently making.
How users like yourself can make make money with Quora
Spammers, online marketers, influencers and others have found ways to monetize Quora. They've probably been profiting long before Quora started monetizing the site themselves.
Every website built around user generated have issues with users pushing their own agendas. The answers are not only facts, but facts plus subjective opinions or marketing in disguise.
There are legitimate ways to financially benefit as a Quora user, and there are questionable methods and black hat strategies. The best way, always, is to aim for legit profit.
Sometimes it's okay to make people aware of your own products or services if you simultaneously are providing value to the community. Don't do shameless plugs or spam the site in any way.
Figure out how to provide value to other Quora users and visitors, and preferably find a way to provide as much value as you possibly can with the resources and time you have available.
Keep in mind that you are doing this on a for-profit platform, and it’s only fair that you will be rewarded in some way for the value you create. It seems Quora are offering some rewards for top writers, but as the service evolves there might be other rewards for quality contributors.
Make money from your own Quora clone?
(TLDR; Probably not going to happen)
It’s not hard to make anything that resembles this site, even for novice programmers and web developers. But you have to remember, getting the traffic is not going to be easy. In 2018 Quora reported hitting 300 million users. It’s not a one man project to run this thing.
There are many Quora clone scripts on the web, and you don't even have to be a programmer to install one of those scripts on your own web server or in a shared hosting environment. Do a quick web search and you will find many, some are even free.
Don't think for a second you're going to make tons of money from installing a simple cloning script of Quora. Those scripts are not worth anything on their own. Attracting users and having them provide quality content is going to be a real challenge.
Remember Quora has been backed with significant amounts by very wealthy angel investors and through various venture capital investments. Don't bother paying for a Quora clone, or writing your own. It's better to come up with your own thing, even if it's just another Q&A site. Don't copy. Invent. Create. Be creative and do your own thing, learn as you go.
Quora was written in python and C++, the site itself seems easy to create for just about any decent programmer. That’s probably a very naive assumption, and it’s safe to think that there’s a lot going on behind the scene, on the server side.
