What Little I Know…

Question-and-answer Websites have seen their audience and usage numbers more than double, when compared to the previous year.

Yahoo! Answers sticks out as the clear winner with 74% of the Q&A market share, but there are new players who are quickly growing in size: WikiAnswers, Answerbag and Askville (a beta Amazon site). Q&A sites probably wouldn’t have been as popular four years ago, but with the rising UGC participation online, people are using Q&A sites as legitimate resource tools and sources of authoritative information. I for one was impressed by the caliber of answer I received when I first tried Yahoo! Answers, just after their official launch date.

“As we see user-generated content proliferating in different flavors, this is yet another way people are interacting with social media,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.

The success of Q&A sites speaks to something we have been saying to publishers all along – create an “ask the expert” section to service your niche categories – automotive, real estate and recruitment. And unlike business models such as Yahoo! Answers or WikiAnswers, you rely on a rotation of your larger advertisers in each vertical to own the Q&A. In doing this you not only avoid the staffing costs associated with managing the product, but you also cover a few crucial areas:

Win an advertiser for life: flattery will get you everywhere. Through asking one of your advertisers to own a portion of your site for three months shows that, you not only value them as a customer, but you think they are experts in their field.

Provide more tools and resources for your readers: an Internet user’s biggest pet peeve is not being able to find or access the information when they want it. This is why navigation and site audits are so important. By providing the “ask the expert” section you give users another way – period!

Comply with information gathering and online consumer trends: if it can work for generalist Q&A sites like Yahoo! then it will definitely work for niche categories.

According to comScore, Yahoo! Answers, had monthly traffic of 25.3 million in February (up from 17.4 million in 2006) and an average time spent online per user of nine minutes per session, according to Hitwise.