It's free to use, but Yahoo have to employ staff and spend money to promote Answers. Apart from putting in some ads, how else could Yahoo get revenue from Answers? Would users pay for a "premium" Answers service?
2006-08-23 14:24:58 · 15 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Internet
Hi Otakugirl,
Answers is what is known as a 'loss leader' - that means Yahoo! will happily suck up the loss of money on this service because they know they can use it to direct users to their other services which *do* make them money - notably, their search engine.
They can also use Answers to harvest information about user habits, again in order to improve their search engine and their advert targetting.
I wouldn't bet on Answers losing too much money directly anyway - there are a lot of users here and a LOT of them will click on adverts. I doubt there is a huge staff to pay.
2006-08-23 14:31:21 · answer #1 · answered by lookforadam 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Good question. Sometimes companies just want to grow and venture into areas with marginal profitability. Maybe once it is known, they will add more advertising. Companies are interested in building market share and driving others out of the market. So if Yahoo has better capitalization, it could add a feature such as this which another service could not afford to add. Those companies could lose enough market share that they might become unprofitable and fold which would then reduce competition for Yahoo.
I really don't know why Yahoo does this, but thank you Yahoo. It's fun!
2006-08-23 14:34:33 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Yahoo has begun to get publicity from answers. At this point this is worth spending money on. As you can tell it is very popular and attracts people all the time.
Yahoo has partnered with a number of companies and having something like this available to us makes Yahoo more attractive.
No one can foresee the future. But the best way for Yahoo to kill this is to begin to charge for it. This I am sure has not been lost on them.
2006-08-23 14:35:55 · answer #3 · answered by John B 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
They don't make money and I don't think they plan to. It's a free service, just something they offer to make Yahoo even more appealing as a brand name. The idea is that the Yahoo community has so much to offer, you'd never want to leave leave, etc.
And frankly it works- I tend to spend most of my time at Yahoo branded pages when I'm just killing time.
2006-08-23 14:29:57 · answer #4 · answered by snaithbert 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
they probably get a lot of demographic information out of this--big corporations love to have insight into what they can sell us next. you can learn a lot about whats going on in e-culture and society if you look at patterns in group behavior like yahoo answers or craigslist.org. it's a valuable research tool for yahoo and for anyone they may want to leverage the information to.
2006-08-23 14:29:02 · answer #5 · answered by Eos 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
WHY the hell do you care!!!! just keep asking questions!!!! k??????
2006-08-23 14:27:25 · answer #6 · answered by THE BEAST 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋
It's all about the ads. I've been noticing them sneaking some in to different pages now too.
2006-08-23 14:32:53 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
the more people on answers the less on google would be there motive
as for paying, theyll probly charge 1 day,god knows why, its all garbage advice
and they wont pay the answerers.
2006-08-23 14:29:07 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
This type of "peer" answer service might become viable, and people will pay for answers.
2006-08-23 16:31:53 · answer #9 · answered by sean percival 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I would NOT pay for Answers. They can get a ton for advertising though.
2006-08-23 14:27:09 · answer #10 · answered by Mama R 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋