2/12/08 - Featured Company: Answerbag
Web Site: www.answerbag.com
Headquarters: Santa Monica, Calif.
Year Founded: 2003
Founder: Joel Downs
Investors: *Answerbag is owned by Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media, which acquired the company in 2006.
Company News: www.demandmedia.com/news-media.asp
By Joel Downs, Founder and CEO
What is Answerbag?
Answerbag.com is more than a leading, independent social knowledge platform and online destination. To the many users, Answerbag is a community of people helping others. Users can ask questions, share answers and collaboratively evaluate information, while building a permanent archive of knowledge and experience. Other sites that share the Answerbag platform—bloggers, web publishers, etc.—leverage the company’s knowledge platform to provide live, social Q&A to their audiences. Answerbag’s mission is to help people find and share knowledge.
As of February 2008, Answerbag has 236,000 registered members who have asked more than 500,000 questions. The site receives over 10,000 answers per day (totaling 2.1 million answers to date since the site’s creation) that are provided in response to the 1,500 daily questions that are received across 6,000 categories. Additionally, Answerbag serves Q&A to 5-and-a-half million unique visitors per month.
What is Social Q&A, and How is Answerbag Different?
As the Internet continues to expand into billions of pages, search tools such as Google and Yahoo! are showing their limitations. For a typical search, they may return hundreds of thousands of results, but they are not useful in helping people find opinions, in evaluating the information they find, and they do not let people ask questions about the information they find. Social Q&A has evolved in order to fill this gap. Using Social Q&A, individuals can ask questions of each other using plain English, they can share answers and as a group they can evaluate the answers and decide which are best. Almost 90 percent of questions are answered within one hour or less.
Unlike other Social Q&A sites, Answerbag archives only unique questions with the best answers to each; it does not allow duplicate questions, so people looking for answers can find them easily without looking under multiple instances of the same question. Answerbag also allows any questions to be answered at any time, and those answers may be rated at any time, so the best answers will be thoroughly vetted and will filter to the top. Additionally, Answerbag’s community works together to help identify duplicate questions, spam and other inappropriate content so that it is quickly removed from the site.
In 2006, Answerbag was the first social Q&A site to add both Image Answers and Video Answers, allowing their members to express themselves in new ways and share knowledge in whatever medium is most appropriate. Questions like “how do you do a wheelie?” or “how do you bathe a baby?” are very hard to answer using straight text, so Video Answers were added to meet that need.
What is the Answerbag Platform?
In an effort to open up its database of questions and answers, Answerbag created the first and only Social Q&A platform that allows other web sites to tap into its active, established community and deep archive of vetted answers. Through its API, partner sites can read Q&A and allow their users to contribute Q&A directly to the Answerbag database. Those questions are then seen by any site on the platform, and users of any of those sites may provide answers, providing a true open question-answering community across the entire platform. When using the Answerbag API, partner sites are charged a nominal fee for making calls to the API, and they can then monetize the traffic however they wish.
For sites that don’t have the resources to take advantage of the API, Answerbag provides a white-label version of their site, as well as a widget that offers Answerbag Q&A in a module that can be skinned to match the partner’s site. When using the white-label solution, Answerbag can share revenue with the partner, so they benefit from the Q&A activity of their members.
Answerbag Widget:
Answerbag’s Social Q&A Platform is ideal for publishers or e-commerce sites that would like to add community or customer support to their sites. Using the API, the white-label solution, or the widgets, publishers can share Q&A in any category they choose.
Answerbag’s questions are separated into a taxonomy of 3,600 categories, with categories as broad as “Real Estate” or “Autos” to categories as narrow as “Particle Physics” and “Mormon Dating.” This deep categorization allows publishers to choose relevant Q&A for their users, no matter what vertical they focus on.
Answerbag’s target market is anyone who is looking for information. Like a traditional search application, just about anyone can benefit from the experience, opinions, and archived, vetted answers found on Answerbag. Its members are 55 percent male, 45 percent female and 50 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34. Currently, Answerbag’s social Q&A experience is only available to English-speakers.
People are naturally inclined to share their knowledge, and using their Social Q&A Platform, Answerbag allows the people of the world to share not just information but knowledge with each other, to improve each others’ lives, and benefit the global society.
Answerbag was founded in July, 2003 by Joel Downs and purchased by Demand Media, Inc., in 2006. The company is located at the Demand Media headquarters in Santa Monica, California.
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