At the Street Fight event last week in New York I was chatting with Darby Sieben of Yellow Media and Sebastien Provencher of HomeAdvisor. The question I posed was: Why have local Q&A sites — indeed most Q&A sites — failed?
It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a little while.
Sure . . . there are a bunch of sites that still exist: Ask (now a Q&A engine in part), Yahoo Answers, Answers.com and so on. Quora’s still alive and so is ChaCha. However Aardvark was bought by Google and shuttered. Facebook closed down its Questions product and most recently LinkedIn Answers ended.
LocalMind was acquired by AirBnB last year. However it’s unlikely the site could have built a sustainable business on its own. Now it will become a piece of functionality in a larger entity with a business model.
While there might be specific answers for the closures in each case overall there seems to be a pattern of falling short of expectations. One very obvious answer to the “why have they failed” question is “lack of critical mass.” Any consumer site or app needs sufficient usage to become sustainable but local apps are a particular challenge — because usage in Boston doesn’t translate equally into usage in Austin or San Diego.
In a Q&A context there typically aren’t enough people with sufficient expertise to answer all the questions in real time or even quasi-real time (10 minutes to a few hours). Yet local Q&A should work. It works “on paper” as an alternative to search.
The idea of tapping local expertise for recommendations, which are more desired and trusted than other forms of information, is logical and seemingly even feasible. But it really has never happened.
Some version of social search is the closest I suspect we’re going to get (i.e., Bing Social Sidebar, Google+ search, Facebook Graph Search, Foursquare). By capturing likes, reviews, recommendations and other affirmations of business quality and capabilities, Q&A can be made “asynchronous.” People can leave a trail of recommendations for others to find later (or when the need arises) through intent-based search and discovery.
Local search with reviews (e.g., Citysearch, Yelp) has been doing a version of this for years. The difference now is the inclusion of the social layer to add a trust filter to the equation. And if well conceived and executed effectively “asynchronous Q&A” or social search can provide the kind of value that I and others had hoped local Q&A would be able to deliver in near real time.
There will also always be groups and ad hoc usage of social networks for local recommendations. But other than the simplistic argument that it’s very difficult to gain usage for local Q&A, I’m still not quite sure why nobody has succeeded in this segment.
What do you think? Why has local Q&A largely failed to date?
January 23rd, 2013 at 12:20 am
Surely the hardest part is getting the critical mass that you need.
January 23rd, 2013 at 12:22 am
Presumably Facebook had this from the get-go.
January 23rd, 2013 at 1:25 pm
[...] Have (Local) Q&A Sites Largely Failed? (Screenwerk) While there might be specific answers for the closures in each case overall there seems to be a [...]
January 23rd, 2013 at 3:48 pm
Hey Greg. Interesting post. In our experience at BlankSlate we see four ingredients as being required for a successful local Q&A site: sufficient scale of site so that there are enough questioners and answerers, well defined focus of site so that people will seek it out, engaged audience including both self-promoting experts providing answers and people asking questions they actually need answers too, and revenue that comes from other parts of the site reducing dependency on direct monetization of Q&A.
See: http://forum.brownstoner.com, http://forum.popville.com
January 23rd, 2013 at 4:27 pm
Scale is obvious. However the more important point you make may be about focus. Industry specific forums are often very active and engaged. The breadth of local Q&A sites may be part of their undoing.
When Quora was new it was mostly a tech-insiders forum. Now that it has moved to broaden and mainstream its usage it has faltered.
January 23rd, 2013 at 11:33 pm
Great point Greg.
One reason that you get so much engagement is your deep focus on our particular market. So there is a great example for you.
That said, are you saying that a big “umbrella” brand couldn’t really work? That you would need to create hundreds / thousands of niche brands to make this work?
January 23rd, 2013 at 11:43 pm
I think it would become unwieldy to do dozes of niche boards or forums. You’d have to pick several high value ones I think. It’s a dilemma: depth vs. breadth.
January 24th, 2013 at 3:26 pm
I’ve often wondered why these haven’t succeeded as well. Here in Amsterdam there’s a Facebook group called “Amsterdam Mamas”. It has 2,400 highly engaged members (almost all mothers with the odd father). I would say about 1/3 of all posts (many per day) are along the lines of “does anyone know where I can find/get/do/see xxx?” Yet there isn’t a site/service which really caters to this requirement.
I guess part of the success of this kind of service is based on awareness of the site and turning using it into a habit. When Facebook first started getting big, it was the email notifications about friends’ activity which brought people back again and again until using the site became a daily habit. Quora sends me interesting stuff every day, plus notifications about topics I follow, and I click on some of the links. Using Google has been a habit for many years. But do you ask local questions frequently enough for it to become a habit to go to a particular site? Plus what kind of external notification would bring you back again?
January 24th, 2013 at 4:02 pm
There are many of these private Mom’s groups are quite common or groups organized around an institution (i.e., church, school). They’re a defined community often (though not always) with an offline component and they’re more trusted and some anonymous, “horizontal” website.
January 29th, 2013 at 3:33 pm
In my experience, Local Q&A works pretty well in Korea (Naver Knowledge IN). This is especially true for Seoul/Incheon, Busan, Daegu, Daejon areas (4 biggest metropolitans).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Search
IMO requirements are:
1. Large dominant incumbent with diverse userbase that can direct a lot of targeted search traffic to the question. (Google?)
2. Dedicated responder-base that geniunely likes helping other people and collecting badges/feedbacks/points (Yelp?)
3. Focus on layout and ease of understanding answers, as well as ability to provide rich content in the answer. This includes the ability to insert custom maps, pictures, etc. (This is a failing of many of the U.S. attempts.)
January 29th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Yes, Naver has clearly been a success. There may be a unique set of variables in the S. Korean market that have contributed to that success that can’t readily be generalized to or duplicated in North America.
April 26th, 2013 at 12:08 pm
[...] long ago I wrote a post called Why Have (Local) Q&A Sites Largely Failed? And they [...]
April 30th, 2013 at 6:15 am
In my opinion, the hardest part is to get a large community to get involved into a question and answer web page, get them to ask question and post answers. It takes something to control the quality of the content, but one can get get to nice results. One of my friends work for a web page like this, at ask.whatafy.com and he told me that he had to work hard and he was not expecting too much, but it developed and grown. I guess it depends on the time and on the people willing to share their problems.