Question and answer (Q&A) sites have a long way to go if they want to take market share away from Yahoo Answers. A really long way. Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott reports that Yahoo Answers controls a little over 96 percent of it.
Wade Roush, writing for MIT’s Technology Review, began the discussion by rating the best Q&A sites. Roush examined Yahoo Answers, Askville, Live QnA, Answerbag, Yedda, and Wondir. Yahoo’s site came out on top, presumably for the sheer number of users.
Prescott took the cue and did a quick statistical rundown. Yahoo Answers is the 100th ranked domain out of about 500,000 that Hitwise tracks, and is second in the greater genre of user-generated knowledge only to Wikipedia. Yahoo captured only about 1/5 of Wikipedia’s Education – Reference traffic.
But when compared to other pure-form Q&A sites, Yahoo Answers crushes all other services like it. Only three of the six sites mentioned in the review broke the one percent mark. Microsoft’s Windows Live QnA popped in at number three with one percent, Answerbag attracted just over two percent.
Yahoo Answers captured 96.1 percent of the US market.
“[F]or the week ending 12/23/06,” writes Prescott, “the market share of visits to Yahoo! Answers was 47X greater than the share of visits to its nearest competitor, Answerbag.”
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