Two Years of Quora Travel in Indonesia

Quora's identity as a question-and-answer platform has been embedded throughout the world. His popularity prompted him to enter Indonesia, the country with the fourth highest population in the world, in 2018 by presenting an Indonesian language site.

Quora then appointed Alanda Kariza as Community Manager for Quora Indonesia. He became the only local employee in Indonesia.

To DailySocial, Alanda claims that since it is available in Indonesian, the enthusiasm of users is very good. Although he did not attach data regarding the growth of visits, content, or users, he said that it can be said that Quora in Indonesia is one of the fastest growing Quora markets outside the United States and India.

To prove Alanda's statement, DailySocial used SimilarWeb data to get some insight. By comparing the English and Indonesian language Quora sites, as well as their competitors, it was found that during July-September 2020, Indonesian sites were visited 3,6 million times each month.

As for monthly unique visitors (monthly unique visitors) of 2,1 million people, the average time spent by users when visiting the Quora Indonesia site is 3 minutes 14 seconds with 2.19 pages per visit.

Interestingly, the Indonesian Quora site is visited more often than the English version. According to SimilarWeb, the site had 2,5 million visits and 1,19 million monthly unique visitors, for the same period.

DailySocial also compares its competitors, even though it doesn't apple-to-apple, with Reddit (which is blocked) and Brainly. Don't forget to include Yahoo Answers ID, the only one that has direct segment slices. It turns out that Brainly tops the list for all the measurement metrics that SimilarWeb uses.

Brainly was visited 140,9 million times and 30,99 million people were unique monthly visitors. Brainly has a similar concept to Quora, only it is more specifically aimed at the world of education, so its users are limited to students and educators. Brainly itself has been present in Indonesia since 2014.

Alanda explained that the topics most accessed by Quorans (as Quora users are known) include history, health, higher education, information technology, culinary, science and psychology. "During the pandemic, users spent more time on Quora than before the pandemic," he said.

In carrying out its duties as a question and answer platform, Alanda explained that Quora always tries to maintain the quality of its content through several policies, including the obligation for users to use their real names and professional or educational credentials to show their credibility in answering questions.

In addition, create a moderation system to reduce spam or plagiarized content by utilizing a combination of humans and muzzle, especially for content with harsh words. "We also created a BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful) policy, where fellow users must respect and respect each other."

In terms of feature development, he continued, Quora recently launched Ruang ("Spaces" in Quora English). There, users can curate question, answer or blog content that they find interesting according to their respective topics.

"Quora users in Indonesia have very high enthusiasm for this space, and now this feature can be used by all users."

In Indonesia, Quora's operations are run by Alanda itself. He also confirmed that Quora has not yet monetized here, while Quora in English already has advertising. Quora's current headquarters are only in Mountain View, California, and India.

Due to the influence of the pandemic, since June the company has transformed into remote first, so that employees can work from wherever they want and this will remain in effect until the pandemic is declared over.

In various reports, Quora is considered "late" in monetization, persists with his idealism not to clutter his site with advertising displays. The company finally “gave in” in 2016 and started accepting its first ads from Uber.

“No one likes advertising banner, ads from fraudulent companies, or ads that are not relevant to their needs,” the company said at the time. “However, we are optimistic that we will be able to introduce advertising on Quora in a way that is appropriate and ideally makes the product better.”

According to data as of January 23 2020, it is said that Quora has 300 million monthly active users. The largest composition came from India, followed by the United States and Canada. Their revenue was stated to be $8 million in 2018.

Opportunities for local players

On the global stage, there are many question and answer platforms such as Quora with different target consumers. There is Stack Overflow which has evolved into a platform for topics about technology, culture/recreation, hobbies/arts, science, professionals, and business presented in separate sites for each.

Meanwhile, more universal topics, such as Quora, can be found on Yahoo Answers, WikiHow, Ask.com, Answers.com, Reddit, and so on. Meanwhile, there are no less topics regarding education, which is Brainly's main focus. There are Byju, Teachoo, Photomath, and so on. At the local level there is too Our Class which has a similar concept.

Still talking about opportunities for local players, competing with Quora is not an easy thing. Previously there were several players who had tried their luck here and ended up sinking by themselves. They are TADO (Ask Dong), Tanyain.comand Infonesia.

This story may be similar to the fact that there are none yet local instant messaging application who dominates in his own country. One of the new players trying their luck here is Philoi which has only been operating since last year. They refuse to be compared by Quora, even though their basic function is the same.

Their mecca is actually Zhihu, a similar platform from China that is equipped with gamification to attract millennial users. Philoit is highly optimistic about building a question and answer platform ecosystem first, then inviting credible people into it.

The previous player's mistake was to use it straight away expert or public figures to attract audiences, while the discussion ecosystem has not yet been formed or even validated. These errors ultimately made it difficult for the platform to maintain expert.