Quora’s Blogging Platform will make millions happy, not just closet writers obviously

As was anticipated, Quora launched its Blogging Platform yesterday, and this news will surely make many happy. Quora has always been tightlipped about the number of users it has and speculation has always been rife. Measuring and assigning a number to the question is difficult but the most popular ballpark figure goes by 1.5million unique visitors as of June 2012 which was a 350% growth over the previous year. The number can now safely be extrapolated to 3 million unique visitors a month as of now.

The site is especially popular in India (175^th most popular in the country) and you’d see many of the long flowing answers coming from Indians. Quora has become a great place to show off intellectual clout and every closet writer comes out in the open here because there’s nothing to lose. The Q&A site allows people to write about their innermost feelings and put it out in the open for millions (named or anonymous). Due to the strict quality checks, Quora didn’t take the Yahoo! Answers route and has remained a place for high quality answers. And more than just information, Quora has become the place for some of the deepest discussions about life. (Read more about the journey of Quora)

The company, founded by ex-Facebook employees, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, has raised $50 million at a $400 million valuation and was being questioned about monetization. This new move of opening up a Blogging Platform takes a step in that direction. There are thousands of people sharing valuable information on the net without a decent readership and Quora will now give a platform to all these knowledgeable people. But along with these writers who used to write huge essay length answers to questions, marketers will also be excited about this prospect.

• Active writers on Quora average 30,000+ monthly views and 350,000+ estimated annual views.
• Most active writers average 90,000+ monthly views and 1+ million estimated annual views.

This is certainly a huge lure for writers to setup their blogs and now they don’t need to wait for a question to dive into their deep intellectual inquires. They can just put it up in words and push it to the boards (topics) related to the blog-post. The CMS is also mobile-friendly which will allow users to update posts on the go. This will directly compete with Tumblr and the recently launched Medium as a platform for great writing but it was perhaps the most viable route for Quora to take.

And this will serve as a great distribution channel for marketers because blogs leave it open for them to move from the side banners and come directly within the content feed where the users can’t escape a look at it. It is still pretty early to say how users will like their feed but this has certainly changed the way Quora functioned.