Marketing

Why I Think Quora’s New Earning Program for Writers Might Fail

And we aren’t going to make much money

Quora might be the platform for questions and answers. If you are a writer, you surely heard of it. I, like many other writers, use the platform to promote our content. Getting paid? This used to happen behind the scenes, not on Quora itself. Yet, Quora wants to change this.

A couple of weeks ago, they announced what will change: Soon, you will be able to purchase a Quora+ subscription for $5 a month. This subscription will give you access to exclusive content on the platform. But who decides what exclusive content is? Well, the writers do! When posting an answer, I can choose whether it should be exclusive or available to everyone.

The benefit of making your content exclusive is clear: You can earn money through it, just like on Medium, Vocal, and other sites.

I love Quora. Don’t get me wrong — I wish with all my heart that it works out. However, I believe it will fail. Here’s why.

Writers aren’t there to make money this way

Nobody thought of Quora making this decision 6 months ago. It surprised me too. While for many, the announcement of monetization on Quora led to euphoria. This wasn’t the case for me. I am skeptical.

I have been on Quora for a year now. Over this time, I collected a huge amount of 2.2 Million views. Of course, this took a couple of answers to write. Yet, it did it — even without getting paid.

This is the case for most writers on Quora. It’s not a platform where your content is the end product. My personal blog is the end product. Quora is a funnel for me and many others writers.

The reason for this is simple. Quora is a perfect platform for short content. Platforms like Medium focus on long-form content. And to be honest, Quora will never be a platform for longer content. Its overall design isn’t inviting to spend more than 30 seconds reading something.

Therefore, writers publish short versions of their content on Quora. The rest of the reader got interested in can be found on the personal website/blog of the writer. This is Quora in a nutshell. It has always been this way.

I can understand Quora’s urge to become something more complete. Yet, I always loved it as it is. Quora is a marketplace for ideas, to me — not a marketplace for texts.

Space subscriptions? Really?

I am sorry to admit this, dear Quora, but I never visited spaces on you on purpose.

The Spaces earning program is a meme. So are spaces themselves. Trust me, I own space with more than 12,000 followers. Even though this amount of followers sounds awesome, they are hardly worth anything.

The reason is that spaces are completely flooded with reposted content, awfully written questions, and a lot of spam—tons of spam, to be precise. As I said, I love Quora. But visiting a space on purpose on this platform is a pain to my eyes.

More shocking to me is that Quora already rolled out the subscription feature for spaces. Why am I shocked? Because I hoped they would change spaces up a lot before taking this step.

Quora needs to make Spaces much better before anyone is going to pay for it. That’s my take on it. For now, the feature reminds me too much of Subreddits on, well, Reddit, of course. But the problem doesn’t end with subreddits. Even on Reddit, I wouldn’t pay a monthly fee for any Subreddit I follow. Sorry again, Quora.

The biggest competitors aren’t other paid-platforms

I will only pay for content I find useful. That’s a no-brainer. So, if Quora offers useful content, would I pay for it monthly? Well, it’s not that easy.

Quora is a very general platform. There is not the main topic the site focuses on. Whenever I need a solution to a problem, I open up Google. My last intention would be searching on Quora. In the end, you might end up on Quora through using Google anyways. But Google offers one great advantage: There is much more content — and much better results than when searching on Quora.

When I have a problem with programming, for example, I end up on a different type of website: Paid websites through ads. You might hate ads, but their huge advantage is that I don’t have to pay monthly for the content — I pay whenever I use the site. That’s it.

Besides that, specialized sites are much better places for offering useful content. I have all these well-made programming blogs in mind. While on Quora, it’s cumbersome to write about code.

Quora is one platform for thousands of topics. Yet, for each topic, there is are many well-made sites that offer content for free. If Quora doesn’t evolve, competing against these might be hard.

Thank you for reading!