Yahoo Answers to be Acquired by Answers.com..?
September 26th, 2008With talks of Yahoo selling off their non-core assets in order to survive the SE battle (or rather, to survive against Google), it raises big questions of what is to be sold and to whom? We’ve heard that they could be selling Yahoo Answers, but it really bigs the question, who would buy it? All signs point to Answers.com.
Yahoo Answers is a community driven knowledge website that allows users to both submit questions to be answered, as well as answer questions that are submitted by other users. It has grown to become the second largest reference site on the web next to Wikipedia, according to Comscore. Users are encouraged to participate by awarding points for logging in, answering questions, voting and being selected as the ‘best answer’ for any given question. The service attracts nearly 150 million monthly visitors.
WikiAnswers is another community driven Q&A website, but it has implemented the Wiki engine in order to constantly improve the questions and answers that are listed. This brings a range of more encyclopedic answers, whereas Yahoo answers is purely community based (and many answers can purely be random hearsay). Answers has already stated before that it intends to bring the two websites closer together, by incorporating both of these concepts. Whilst there are much better Web 2.0 models already in existence, none have taken off properly - so this acquisition would make perfect sense.
Whilst nothing has been confirmed yet, I really don’t see why anybody else would have any reason to really be in serious discussions with Yahoo about buying this section of their company.






