I ♥ Quora. Oh yes, I’m a fanboy.
As my many of my friends and family know, I love Quora and get a ton of value out of it. It’s incredible to see what some of the most intelligent and influential folks in Silicon Valley and beyond have to say, and it’s some of the most valuable content I read every morning.
My prediction for Quora is that it’s going to turn into a huge, important Internet property- it’ll break out of the Valley network easily and inevitably. The experience of Facebook going from college-to-college will inform a strategy of going topic-to-topic, profession-to-profession, and network-to-network. I can easily see how the Q&A mechanics would apply to many other things, especially the political blogosphere and Beltway insiders, the entertainment industry in LA, the media and advertising industry, as well as random everyday stuff. And of course, it’s one of the best executed products I’ve seen in a long time- the interaction design in the product is amazing.
Writing down all the things that product designers and entrepreneurs can learn from studying Quora would be many blog posts in itself. Like I said, I’m a fanboy :-)
Facebook app data shows stats for connected sites and products, including Quora
All the fanboys want to know: Quora’s been growing, but how fast? I recently realized that because Facebook sign-in is used so aggressively by Quora, they will end up getting listed as an app just like everyone else. As a result, Facebook (for better or worse) ends up publishing their DAU and MAU stats, which are then stored and graphed on services like AppData, AllFacebook’s stats service, and others. This establishes a lower-bound for all the core users who have authed to Facebook, but obviously doesn’t count users who bounce or who don’t sign up, etc.
I included the public listings for Quora excerpted from both AllFacebook and AppData. (Both are great services, I’d encourage you to try them). As you can see from the graphs, Quora is growing on a very nice clip, over 2X larger in MAU over the last month. Very nice!
Caveats: These numbers ought to be a lower bound since not everyone is going to either 1) register on Quora, nor 2) connect their Facebook accounts. As a result, I’m sure the real uniques number is much larger, but this is probably a good estimate of the active Quora community. I’ve also seen a lot of Quora answers in my search engine result pages, so I’m sure there’s easily a multiple that come purely to look at the answers and then bounce, that ought to be added to the totals. So again, think of it as a lower bound, but I imagine that the relative growth trajectory is right.
Again, this is really impressive growth and I look forward to seeing Quora’s progress continue.
PS. For the data geeks out there: If someone else does a more thorough analysis on their historic growth rate, sticky ratio, benchmarks/comparisons, etc., please write it in a comment and I’ll link you. And please point out if I’m misinterpreting these stats!
