Quora, the question-and-answer website managed by its community of users, has started testing advertisements on its service in the company's first attempt to monetize its platform.
The advertisements, which are under what the company calls an experimental pilot stage, will be appearing on a small number of question pages. The advertisements will be from Uber, Lever, Sunrun and Wealthfront.
Quora currently has more than 100 million unique visitors per month as of March, which represents an impressive 22 percent increase since January. The user growth could be what attracted the advertisers to participate in the platform's beta advertising test, with Quora stating that other interested advertisers are free to contact the company to be informed once advertisements on the service are available.
Quora is looking to ensure its users that the contents of advertisements on the service will meet the quality of the content of questions and their accompanying answers, which would address concerns on the overall website experience after the launch of advertising. In addition, advertisements will carry a "promoted by" tag so that there will be no confusion between a sponsored answer and a legitimate one.
The advertisements will be seen in both the Web and mobile app versions of Quora, though there has been no indication on whether the company will use a third-party service for advertisement management or if it has developed its own. The current focus of Quora, however, is on making sure that the advertisements will not impede with the platform's goal to share and grow the knowledge of the world.
Since the launch of the Quora website in 2010, the updates being implemented to the service have focused on its knowledge dissemination mission. In November last year, the service launched the Writing Sessions feature that rivals the Ask Me Anything question-and-answer segment of online forum Reddit. The current testing of advertising on Quora signals that the company is now looking to make money off its service, which is a first for it.
