Why Does Fred Wilson Think That a Lot of Vertical Q&A Sites Like Stack

7/19/2016 Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? Quora

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Stack Overflow Q&A Websites Product and Services Comparisons Startups Quora What has made the signaltonoise ratio on Stack Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A Overflow better than other technical Q&A sites? sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than Is Quora turning into a vertical Q&A site about startups? horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/... How should Q&A sites like Quora and stack Overflow handle old discussions?

7 Answers Can Q&A sites threaten Google? I find Stack Exchange sites quite useful but other Keith Rabois, I worked at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and Square, invested in YouTube, than Stack Overflow, I find their other sites yammer, ... unforgiving and sometimes rude. Has anyone el... 7k Views · Upvoted by Jonathan Brill, Writer Relations @ Quora and Antone Johnson, Startup lawyer for 19 years; VP & Director roles inhouse; preseed through exit Why do the Stack Exchange sites have better performance (faster loading times) than Quora? Keith has 90+ answers and 21 endorsements in Startups

Remember vertical search engines? They were all the rage. Oh, yeah, I still Google that. Will Quora displace vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com)? Fred is partially right, but mostly wrong. It is easier to create a vibrant community Are there any Q & A sites that are better than Quora? around a narrow topic, but substantially less valuable: Vertical Q & A sites can be moderately successful but are unlikely to create billions of dollars of value or Is Beepl a better Q&A site than Quora? fundamentally transform the Internet. Is Google moving towards a faceoff with Q&A sites like Quora, Stack Overflow over social search? Why? It is easier to build for the reasons Ben identifies: Dualsided markets require hand crafting to ensure equilibrium between questions and expertise. Trying to balance these across multiple verticals simultaneously is very difficult. One can argue that this was a key mistake we made at LinkedIn Answers, although I am not persuaded it is the true cause.

The problem to the vertical approach is that it produces subpar engagement and retention. It is extremely challenging to persuade users to revisit your site on a daily or even weekly basis if it does not serve a broad purpose.

To wit, Craigslist is insulated from most ecommerce assaults because of its combination of personal ads, job listings and housing options. The personals and sex ads account for a majority of the page views and retention even though the other sections drive their revenues. Likewise, the general purpose Amazon is now on the precipice of eating up much of ecommerce: http://www.businessinsider.com/c... .

Back to Q&A: In a vertical site, you would never generate some of the most compelling Quora answers which are often very far removed from startups, venture capital and engineering, although mostly written by those who are professionally dedicated to those fields. (See the most popular answers for a sample of some very random topics: What answers on Quora have the most upvotes? ) Quora would feel like a professional obligation, not something to look forward to. Most people procrastinate chores. Written Jun 10, 2010 · View Upvotes

Related Questions More Answers Below

What has made the signaltonoise ratio on Stack Overflow better than other technical Q&A sites?

Is Quora turning into a vertical Q&A site about startups?

How should Q&A sites like Quora and stack Overflow handle old discussions?

Can Q&A sites threaten Google?

I find Stack Exchange sites quite useful but other than Stack Overflow, I find their other sites unforgiving and sometimes rude. Has anyone el...

Matt Gattis, Cofounder / CTO of Hunch https://www.quora.com/WhydoesFredWilsonthinkthatalotofverticalQAsiteslikeStackOverflowwillperformbetterthanhorizontalQAsiteslikeQ… 1/6 7/19/2016 Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? Quora 837 Views Sign In I think it's mostly a Sfaelsaer cdhi lfeomr mquae.s t iQonuso,r ap edoopeles ,a a gnodo tdo pjoicbs of segregating the populations so that it's still conducive to community development. Plus using this site has really made me impressed with how prolific most experts are across multiple verticals.

The only issue I see with the horizontal approach is that a lot of people (myself probably included) overextend their expertise into topics they only have a birdseye view of, and I see a lot of answers upvoted to the top that sound right but are ultimately less well informed than others. This is mostly limited to academic topics though. Written Jun 30, 2010 · View Upvotes

Eghosa Omoigui, Stage/Geoagnostic Tech Investor & Startup Advisor 402 Views Some really good points. Lawd i love Quora!

ok, i'll freestyle some thoughts here...

I think Fred was conflating two separate issues here: (a) why vertical approaches will always matter and, (b) what the historical horizontal approaches have yet to do successfully.

Dualsided markets by definition have a circular opportunity and problem. The opportunity is that one creates a base platform to pose queries and the problem is that one needs to source/attract/retain a xsection of domain experts who are best positioned to respond.

worth noting that while the vertical approach solves the issue of presenting a constellation of specific interests that also attracts niche expertise, by definition, it will only attract a relatively small part of the broader 'net population. may be no less valuable though.

i disagree with the premise that smaller/narrower equates to subpar engagement and/or retention. the key issue in my opinion is that the folks who run such sites seem less interested in the metrics that we as investors or valleybased/influenced entrepreneurs use to measure success and more interested in making sure they continue to offer a curated and high value environment. I have spent quite a bit of time researching q&a over the last few years so my insights come from a bunch of interviews, my thesis on how to attack the opportunity and general research.

Random example: i like cars. a lot. and so i spend time on a variety of forums and message boards that are optimized (around brands/makes/models) for car lovers...those message boards may not have a ton of traffic (a measure by which we in the Valley may lead us to believe that they have thus failed) but as a source of advice, guidance, mentorship and recommendations, they are simply second to none because they have domain experts who truly enjoy offering advice and msg board members who appreciate the advice. and the visitors come back often. personally i am on there 23x/wk. i am still amused by the conversation thread (a few years ago) on one of the msg boards re: circumventing the nav sys safety lockout on a Lexus even some dealer service advisors were blown away by the elegance of the solution and were not afraid to acknowledge that they had had no idea it was possible. I would not go anywhere else to seek insights or if i do, i would take whatever i learn elsewhere and come back to seek validation. Period. Note that this is true even for what one may describe as 'subjective' answers.

That said, dont fall for the CW that small is always positively correlated w/ lower case revenues. As a very very very senior exec w/ a well known 'fruit' company told me when i asked in a casual conversation why they priced their offerings so high at the expense of gaining oodles of market share, 'eghosa, we dont want everybody as a customer.' Needless to say, the company's revenues and GMs are UATTR so something is working well in their 'niche.'

The horizontal approach by definition offers value to a much broader user base and its this user base that we all try to correlate to broader 'net value. The typical visitor gets to go wide but may not necc be inclined to go deep (or be so interested for that matter). I would posit that the q&q&a interactions in such sites are by definition lightfilling and thus may fall below the nutritional IQ recommended daily allowance (and wont significantly change one's life). Yahoo Answers wins the blue ribbon here. https://www.quora.com/WhydoesFredWilsonthinkthatalotofverticalQAsiteslikeStackOverflowwillperformbetterthanhorizontalQAsiteslikeQ… 2/6 7/19/2016 Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? Quora So where i see the real opportunity is a combination of Quora, StackOverflow, TextDigger and Aardvark. A broad horizontal platform w/ a constellation of topics that are auto organized and curated by vertical communities and most importantly, offers the ability to locate/crosspollinate experts both inside and outside those communities/networks. I will say this: there are message board and forums out there that have tons of highvalue data but folks are still struggling to surface the insights in an elegant and easily discoverable way. i also learned in my research interviews that a bunch of domain experts who have generated tons of interesting postings on other fora have categorically said they DONT WANT TO DO SO REPEATEDLY so we have the dilemma of being able to extract and link to them.

Separately, I have always been a tad suspicious of the whole social recommendation wave because it seems to inherently assume that my immediate social network has the domain experts i need whereas what i really want is to use my social network to FIND the domain experts i need (or i can trust). and i dont use the term 'expert' lightly either...there are lots of opinionated folks on horizontal sites (and my social network) but finding the experts among them is really difficult...and no, simply because you work at Google doesnt make you an expert on search...

i also think that there is still a gap in the model of engagement...aggregating/summarizing interesting answers, sending eupdates to me, allowing me to 'ping' the knowledgebase from a variety of devices and use cases, consolidating similar topics to eliminate the possibility of being overwhelmed (topic phrasing is not a trivial problem as we each can describe the same thing in diff ways), improving the recommendation tech (CF + ML) and identifying WHY someone is thought to be an expert (so a trustbased combo of community votes, background, interests, etc.)...i would actually subscribe to a service like that... Written Jul 6, 2010 · View Upvotes

Brandon Smietana, Founder of Symbolic Analytics 436 Views · Brandon has 60+ answers and 9 endorsements in Startups What we are seeing is that vertically oriented Q&A sites are creating the best answers to the hard questions. There was a very good Q&A website about algebraic geometry and category theory, which I thought was the best example of this. I will try to dig up the website.

Horizontally integrated Q&A sites are creating the best user engage and answers to the "soft questions." We see this with Quora, Yahoo Answers and Aardvark.

Quora is much less effective at creating communities of experts for answering questions about mathematics, physics and computer science than the vertically integrated sites. It has a greater breadth, but not a depth in domain and expertise knowledge.

The people on Quora that answer questions are the people who want to answer the questions, not the people who have the best answer. The answers which are ranked the highest are the answers people agree with, not the best ones.

Often times I will have a question and I want to understand the question better. I want data and analysis that is tangentially related to the question that lets me refine what I am asking and draws in other people with similar problems. Horizontally integrated Q&A sites so far have not enabled a synthesis of knowledge and expertise towards the solution to the problem. They are more entertainment than they are a technological system for collaborative problem solving.

I do not think there will be a "winner" or that there has to exist a winner. Horizontally integrated sites are likely to achieve wider usage by a wider audience and achieve scale. Vertically integrated sites will create communities of practice and increasingly externalize the previously implicit knowledge that human experts carry with them.

Horizontal Q&A type applications are likely to take the lion's share of traffic in the consumer internet space. However vertical Q&A will be dominant for nonentertainment usage and especially in the enterprise market. We are already seeing examples of highly specialized Q&A type applications for financial analysis to exchange data and analysis cross firm. Similar applications for corporate strategy and other areas are already in process.

Vertically integrated Q&A is enabling cross firm information flow and the creation of cross https://www.quora.com/WhydoesFredWilsonthinkthatalotofverticalQAsiteslikeStackOverflowwillperformbetterthanhorizontalQAsiteslikeQ… 3/6 7/19/2016 Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? Quora firm communities of practice which enable individual departments or specialists to better achieve their roles within their organization.

You have to remember that there already exist established horizontally integrated Q&A platforms, such as Yahoo Answers and these have been very successful. It's not even clear at this point whether horizontal Q&A sites will grow the aggregate user base significantly or merely redistribute users and revenues.

Q&A sites are just one form of user created content site and its probably completely irrelevant in the long run what happens in this market at all. Consumer internet and advertising is after all only a very very small portion of our economy. It's a very visible part of our economy, but its not the most profitable, largest or most significant.

I think everyone agrees that its unlikely that we are going to see any companies pushing $20 billion per year in revenue in the Q&A space. I also feel the category "Q&A site" is somewhat vacuous of what these websites are actually used for; it probably will not be a useful classification in ten years. Written Jun 24, 2010 · View Upvotes

Anonymous 1.6k Views · Upvoted by Joel Spolsky, Founder and CEO of Stack Exchange Inc (the company behind Stack Overflow) Fred Wilson is basically a random strategy generator, but he's right on in this case, and he's not just talking his portfolio.

Winnertakeall sites work best when you have tons of shared functionality and somewhat overlapping networks between all possible users, as is true for Facebook. When you have natural niches, like different types of goods, or services, or types of information, you can optimize on each niche better than a single site for all, and the history of consumer Internet bears this out. Consider these examples:

eBay: Seems like they should have won the market for person to person commerce, right? Wrong: etsy and stubhub and even Amazon marketplaces have taken away major parts of their auction volume through specialization into niches: handmade items, tickets, and books/media. StubHub can do a lot more for ticket buyers/sellers specifically than eBay can. In fact, when eBay really wants to own a category, they're forced to create a whole new site around it with a specialized schema and tools, like eBay motors, half.com , etc.

Yelp vs. generalized review sites: Yelp focused, smartly, on a few key cities to get major liquidity, rather than smearing their effort across the whole country at once. Yelp is still primarily useful in about 20 metro areas in the US and not so much outside of those, but that still makes for a nearbilliondollar company.

Stack Overflow or Formspring.me: These sites focused on one specific use case with depth, and they are doing far better than any other Q&A site on the web outside of the gorilla: Yahoo! Answers, which currently sees about 30M monthly uniques. Yahoo! is playing the role of eBay here, and specialized competitors are pulling away pieces of it. Why would you ask a coding question on Yahoo! Answers today?

Now, Fred's wrong about the Stack Exchange model solving the problem here; part of the value of niches is the separation in user focus, in terms of different sites w/different user bases, but a big part is also the separation in functionality. Check out etsy and StubHub and ask yourself how poorly eBay handles those markets with their oneinterfacetorule themall. Stack Exchange is sort of Ning for Q&A; it's not tailored to individual niches all that well. Some niches will require focused attention, and Stack Exchange won't be able to handle them well with generic/lowestcommondenominator interfaces that apply to all fields.

A lot of smart people think that the Q&A model will look more like Facebook, or Google, where you do have a single dominant player. I think that's completely wrong. For Google, it's about distribution; Google is the entry point but not the destination for most of their users. So sure, a Q&A site could index and metasearch all the other Q&A sites, but that's not what most of them are trying to do, and frankly search is a problem where the technology extends especially well across different fields, so Google will own that for the foreseeable future. And Q&A sites don't have anywhere near the technical hurdles that https://www.quora.com/WhydoesFredWilsonthinkthatalotofverticalQAsiteslikeStackOverflowwillperformbetterthanhorizontalQAsiteslikeQ… 4/6 7/19/2016 Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like Stack Overflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora? Quora Google does; that's not going to be a key competitive advantage for Stack Overflow or Quora or anyone else (as it was and is for Google).

Facebook is strong primarily because it mediates these small social networks of a few hundred friends/colleagues, which means that each small network is sort of a de facto specialized site for their members, but that's not what Q&A is typically about; mostly, you want the best answer from millions of people, not just the best answer from your buds. There are very few questions where your social network alone will give you a goodenough answer. And if it is...well, there's a site for that already, and it's 400 million users strong and shows no signs of slowing down. Written May 9, 2010 · View Upvotes

Ben Lopatin, I leverage synergies. 325 Views Q&A sites are twosided markets, and their success depends heavily on the quality of question and the quality of answers and people answering. Vertical sites provide a natural filter.

If you've got a question about mod_wsgi you go to Stack Overflow. You're not going to find you answers on Yahoo! Answers because few people with a detailed knowledge of mod_wsgi and a desire to share with other programmers care to get involved with such a massive, loosely knit, and nonprogramming community. But Stack Overflow is all programming and programmers, so someone like Graham Dumpleton, who wrote mod_wsgi, has an interest in becoming involved and answering questions.

More importantly, I think, that narrow focus helps people selfselect out of the pool of potential answerers. If you want to know where babby comes from, the answer from an obstetrics community will probably be better than that from the hoi polloi over at Yahoo Answers.

The successful horizontal Q&A site will find a way to build a horizontal array of topics around a vertically organized community, mutually interested people, if not mutually interested questions. Written Jun 10, 2010 · View Upvotes

Ashutosh Saxena, featured startups on Pluggd.in (now NextBigWhat.com) 218 Views I am afraid Fred is mistaken. The popularity of one Quora over 87 StackExchange (older) verticals answers many questions about it.

The biggest flaw with the verticalmodel is that it assumes there will be no overlaps among the people using those verticals, even though the StackExchange sites are so varied, from English to Christianity to Sports to Ubuntu. Why can't people be in multiple communities?

I follow and answer questions on English, UX, Photography, Code Review, Ubuntu, Graphic Design, Mathematics on StackExchange in addition to Stack Overflow. It becomes really difficult to follow all these separate sites, thereby reducing my overall activity on these verticals that serve the same purpose.

Heck, they don't even have a common dashboard for sites I follow.

The only flipside of using a common community like Quora is that reputations will have to be maintained across different verticals, a difficult thing to do. Quora, however, replaced reputations with credits, and in that scheme of things, it should hurt.

I am not sure, but I see StackExchange as a huge buyout option for Quora, and use the questions on the various fora to create an integrated community, also maintaining the current approach of these verticals, bringing in users of both these schools of thought together, ending up in a winwin situation. Written Jul 29, 2012 · View Upvotes

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