9 ms·

Whatever happened to Quora?

52 points by ignifero 16y ago

robryan 16y ago
That's based off search volume on the term isn't it? Meaning that there was a spike of new people hearing about the service. Just because the initial media attention has come off doesn't mean those attracted in the spike aren't still around.
rudiger 16y ago
Generally, this is how most sites work. For each successive wave of popularity, they'll experience a spike followed by a decline, but the decline is to a higher level than it was pre-spike.
robk 16y ago
Trends for Websites is much better for actual site traffic estimates. http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&date=ytd http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&#3...
tdmackey 16y ago
The spike probably had a lot to do with the release of Tron: Legacy on December 17 who had a character named Quorra which could easily be misspelled as Quora. The trend for Quorra largely follows this spike as seen at http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all... Nothing happend to Quora.com.
- Tycho 16y ago
  Hmmm. Is this an established practice for choosing product names? (regardless of whether it was intentional in this case) Excuse me while I look up the cast list of the next James Cameron movie.
  - RBr 16y ago
    The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.
    - pacohn 16y ago
      >The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site existed, which isn't without value. As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your name slightly, and get some press about it.
      - Mystalic 16y ago
        They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a negative.
        pacohn 16y ago
        Why would it be negative? Personally, I'd just think "oh there's a site with a similar name", and move on. I wouldn't fault the site for that.
        bmelton 16y ago
        The 'move on' part doesn't exactly speak well for capturing new customers. Certainly not well enough that you'd sacrifice a better, more appropriate name?
        pacohn 16y ago
        Well, I guess the quality of the name is another point entirely, and the scheme might unravel there. :) I just thought it was an interesting idea. If the quora spike did come from Tron, I think it's at least interesting to consider engineering such an accident. It might be good, bad, or a wash, but IMO I think the bounces would be an overall positive. The name... that is another problem.
- ignifero 16y ago
  That explains it. I actually like quora, so got worried. Now i 'm off to buy WimpyKidRodrickRules.com
- awarzzkktsyfj 16y ago
  Really? You can plot them together, and it appears 'quorra' spiked about two weeks before 'quora'. Tron released December 17th 2010, according to wikipedia, correlating nicely with 'quorra' searches. What happened January 1st to cause a huge spike in 'quora' searches? http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0&#3...
- jmtame 16y ago
  I wonder if it will make a comeback. Tron Legacy (DVD rip) was the #4 most downloaded movie on piratebay yesterday with 12,000 seeders and the DVD doesn't release for another 2 days.
hucker 16y ago
I guess the hype is wearing off? It was bound to happen when it was evangelized like the second coming of christ by TechCrunch et al. I'm guessing that the vast majority of users is realizing that it's not much more than a new Q&A-site that was fortunate/skilled enough to get a lot of Silicon Valley elite on board as users at an early stage. It will be interesting to watch Quora in the coming times, they're facing some of the same troubles as HN is facing: it gained popularity because the quality of content was high due to the contributors often being well-connected SV-elite. Now they're facing the backlash of popularity; low-quality content on both the Q and A side of the equation. EDIT: Not to say that SV-elite means guaranteed quality content, but "they" provided(provides?) a lot of interesting insight on Quora.
RBr 16y ago
Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora. Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.
- erik_p 16y ago
  ^^^ I came here to say this. With that said, I'm a little sick of the quora hype. I have a love/hate relationship with the UI decisions they made. I haven't had a ton of luck with the questions I've asked on the site, but I have found it useful when researching existing (answered) questions. Although those questions tend to be very valley/startup centric.
bauchidgw 16y ago
such peaks of brand interrest are quite common for new and hyped internet brands/startups. now comes the time of constant but slow(er) growth or failure.
ajays 16y ago
Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.
- edw 16y ago
  Quora is like TED in that it provides exhibitionists and flatterers of the powerful an opportunity to meet up with voyeurs and those who get a rush from being in the presence of quote-genius-unquote. You are what you like, and as soon as everyone knows that you are a Hans Rosling nerd, it is a certainty that you'll be significantly closer to saving the world—and getting a million Twitter followers. What's not to like?
- ootachi 16y ago
  That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be something more, and it seems that they're having a hard time breaking free.
  - JayNeely 16y ago
    I've found Quora to be great for non-tech topics. Human relationships, cooking, pop culture, lifestyle topics are all active on Quora and contain good content.
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    This is slowly changing. For instance, see: http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher
    - andrewcooke 16y ago
      Ha. I guess you don't realise he's on there because he's an investor in early tech companies in the Bay Area? And he's been there for ages.
benologist 16y ago
TC pumped and dumped them. It will be interesting to see if they can stand on their own two feet but I doubt they will. The homepage is anti-new users, and if you register in spite of that you better subscribe to popular topics or else you'll have no new content and no reason to come back.
- wwkeyboard 16y ago
  I wonder how much of the new-user experience is to avoid an eternal september? Allowing people to easily sounds off on a few things and leave(like I'm doing right now) is not conducive to building a community.
rrhoover 16y ago
Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com) and Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/) are better tools to measure traction. Looks like they've had a slight decline lately. With all the buzz they received early this year, I'm not surprised it's lower.
- codingthewheel 16y ago
  Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.
  - rrhoover 16y ago
    Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.
gallerytungsten 16y ago
I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky. Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for myself.
yakto 16y ago
They're doing ok, probably just a mini-sharkfin from a wave of press. Interesting that HN is over half as big: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinator.com&geo=all&date=all http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinat...
igorgue 16y ago
People realized it sucks :-) And Techcrunch that it's not worth to talk about it?
duncanj 16y ago
I feel like on Quora the same 10 people are writing the majority of the content (and it is getting boring). Maybe I'm not using it appropriately, but if so their interface isn't helping me improve my experience.
inmygarage 16y ago
Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the spike.

52 points by ignifero 16y ago

That's based off search volume on the term isn't it? Meaning that there was a spike of new people hearing about the service. Just because the initial media attention has come off doesn't mean those attracted in the spike aren't still around.

rudiger 16y ago

Generally, this is how most sites work. For each successive wave of popularity, they'll experience a spike followed by a decline, but the decline is to a higher level than it was pre-spike.

robk 16y ago

Trends for Websites is much better for actual site traffic estimates. http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&date=ytd http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com&geo=all&#3...

tdmackey 16y ago

The spike probably had a lot to do with the release of Tron: Legacy on December 17 who had a character named Quorra which could easily be misspelled as Quora. The trend for Quorra largely follows this spike as seen at http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra&ctab=0&geo=all... Nothing happend to Quora.com.

Tycho 16y ago
Hmmm. Is this an established practice for choosing product names? (regardless of whether it was intentional in this case) Excuse me while I look up the cast list of the next James Cameron movie.
- RBr 16y ago
  The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.
  - pacohn 16y ago
    >The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate. Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site existed, which isn't without value. As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your name slightly, and get some press about it.
    - Mystalic 16y ago
      They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a negative.
      - pacohn 16y ago
        Why would it be negative? Personally, I'd just think "oh there's a site with a similar name", and move on. I wouldn't fault the site for that.
        bmelton 16y ago
        The 'move on' part doesn't exactly speak well for capturing new customers. Certainly not well enough that you'd sacrifice a better, more appropriate name?
        pacohn 16y ago
        Well, I guess the quality of the name is another point entirely, and the scheme might unravel there. :) I just thought it was an interesting idea. If the quora spike did come from Tron, I think it's at least interesting to consider engineering such an accident. It might be good, bad, or a wash, but IMO I think the bounces would be an overall positive. The name... that is another problem.
ignifero 16y ago
That explains it. I actually like quora, so got worried. Now i 'm off to buy WimpyKidRodrickRules.com
awarzzkktsyfj 16y ago
Really? You can plot them together, and it appears 'quorra' spiked about two weeks before 'quora'. Tron released December 17th 2010, according to wikipedia, correlating nicely with 'quorra' searches. What happened January 1st to cause a huge spike in 'quora' searches? http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=quorra%2C+quora&ctab=0&#3...
jmtame 16y ago
I wonder if it will make a comeback. Tron Legacy (DVD rip) was the #4 most downloaded movie on piratebay yesterday with 12,000 seeders and the DVD doesn't release for another 2 days.

hucker 16y ago

I guess the hype is wearing off? It was bound to happen when it was evangelized like the second coming of christ by TechCrunch et al. I'm guessing that the vast majority of users is realizing that it's not much more than a new Q&A-site that was fortunate/skilled enough to get a lot of Silicon Valley elite on board as users at an early stage. It will be interesting to watch Quora in the coming times, they're facing some of the same troubles as HN is facing: it gained popularity because the quality of content was high due to the contributors often being well-connected SV-elite. Now they're facing the backlash of popularity; low-quality content on both the Q and A side of the equation. EDIT: Not to say that SV-elite means guaranteed quality content, but "they" provided(provides?) a lot of interesting insight on Quora.

RBr 16y ago

Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora. Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic: http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.

erik_p 16y ago
^^^ I came here to say this. With that said, I'm a little sick of the quora hype. I have a love/hate relationship with the UI decisions they made. I haven't had a ton of luck with the questions I've asked on the site, but I have found it useful when researching existing (answered) questions. Although those questions tend to be very valley/startup centric.

bauchidgw 16y ago

such peaks of brand interrest are quite common for new and hyped internet brands/startups. now comes the time of constant but slow(er) growth or failure.

ajays 16y ago

Interestingly, a large chunk of the traffic comes from SF and the Bay Area. That leads me to believe that Quora is to a large extent a Bay Area echo-chamber.

edw 16y ago
Quora is like TED in that it provides exhibitionists and flatterers of the powerful an opportunity to meet up with voyeurs and those who get a rush from being in the presence of quote-genius-unquote. You are what you like, and as soon as everyone knows that you are a Hans Rosling nerd, it is a certainty that you'll be significantly closer to saving the world—and getting a million Twitter followers. What's not to like?
ootachi 16y ago
That's the problem with Quora for me. When it first started to get big, I tried searching for things that weren't startup- or Silicon Valley-related, and the results were practically nonexistent. Maybe that's changed since then, but it didn't give me a good first impression. Not that there's anything wrong with a Q&A site for startups - that may well be a very good niche - but Quora clearly seems to want to be something more, and it seems that they're having a hard time breaking free.
- JayNeely 16y ago
  I've found Quora to be great for non-tech topics. Human relationships, cooking, pop culture, lifestyle topics are all active on Quora and contain good content.
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  This is slowly changing. For instance, see: http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher http://www.quora.com/Ashton-Kutcher
  - andrewcooke 16y ago
    Ha. I guess you don't realise he's on there because he's an investor in early tech companies in the Bay Area? And he's been there for ages.

benologist 16y ago

TC pumped and dumped them. It will be interesting to see if they can stand on their own two feet but I doubt they will. The homepage is anti-new users, and if you register in spite of that you better subscribe to popular topics or else you'll have no new content and no reason to come back.

wwkeyboard 16y ago
I wonder how much of the new-user experience is to avoid an eternal september? Allowing people to easily sounds off on a few things and leave(like I'm doing right now) is not conducive to building a community.

rrhoover 16y ago

Quantcast (http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com http://www.quantcast.com/quora.com) and Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/quora.com/) are better tools to measure traction. Looks like they've had a slight decline lately. With all the buzz they received early this year, I'm not surprised it's lower.

codingthewheel 16y ago
Respectfully disagree - Compete and Alexa both depend on toolbars, and no techie in his right mind wants to install such a thing. Quantcast doesn't use a toolbar, but it's heavily biased towards Quantcast-aware publishers who place the QC script on their pages. Long story short: these sites are bad for measuring traffic, but especially bad for measuring tech / power user / early adopter traffic.
- rrhoover 16y ago
  Compete and Quantcast (if not "Quantified") are not good measurements of actual traffic estimates but they can usually report trends somewhat accurately. However, you make a great point about the tech/early adopter crowd which are the primary users for Quora.

gallerytungsten 16y ago

I find the Quora interface and usability to be kind of clunky and finicky. Their "walled garden" site rules are also a bit finicky. While it was interesting to poke around Quora a bit, I didn't perceive much value for myself.

yakto 16y ago

They're doing ok, probably just a mini-sharkfin from a wave of press. Interesting that HN is over half as big: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinator.com&geo=all&date=all http://trends.google.com/websites?q=quora.com,news.ycombinat...

igorgue 16y ago

People realized it sucks :-) And Techcrunch that it's not worth to talk about it?

duncanj 16y ago

I feel like on Quora the same 10 people are writing the majority of the content (and it is getting boring). Maybe I'm not using it appropriately, but if so their interface isn't helping me improve my experience.

inmygarage 16y ago

Quora got a ton of press right around the end of the year - big articles in a lot of major press outlets. That likely accounts for at least some of the spike.