Will Quora's answers get a billion views in the future?
To get billion view answers Quora will need a user base in billions. Platforms like YouTube have billion views content mostly because of their different view count policy compared to Quora.
About 3.8% (370M) of the whole population (7.8B) uses Quora as of 2020. Quora ranks 80th for global traffic according to Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, & Website Ranking (Alexa). Quora has active visitors and users from India, the USA, the UK, Pakistan, Canada, Australia, and China.
India and China
For any tech giant or a social media site, India and China are the biggest markets due to their high population. Quora obviously needs them to build a user base in billions.
- Quora may get banned in China like other social media. This will affect Quora’s user growth rate.
- Quora has faced a major boost in users after the introduction of Quora in Indian languages. India is certainly a big market for Quora now and in the future.
According to current growth, Quora will reach about a billion users by 2030. But it also depends on Quora’s actions in the upcoming years. The banning of Quora in China while also has an impact on the billion view target. On the other hand, Quora will grow well in India. So with an affected growth rate, Quora will reach 1B users only after 2030 or it may never reach it before even 2040.
Most viewed Quora Answer
Even though Quora has 300M users, the most viewed answer on Quora Gabriel Weinberg’s answer to Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google? took 2 years to reach 62% audience (187M) with sponsoring. So without sponsoring, an answer will take so much time to build views, and reaching 1B views is near impossible.
Too Old To Upvote and Share
So even if Quora gets 1B users in 2030, an answer will take at least 10 years to get 1B views organically. Before that, the answer will lose its popularity and will become Too Old To Upvote and Share. New users will create new answers and old answers will not appear often in the feed. So reaching 1B people without or with sponsoring is very difficult while having such a huge userbase.
So why do YouTube videos have billion view videos?
Quora is not like Youtube. YouTube Videos seldom get more views because people may watch them again and again, watch them from different devices, etc.
See How Youtube video views are counted? by Google Support.
It is not possible for a Quora answer to get viewed again and again (because no one does it, plus, Quora considers one view per one account which is different from Youtube’s view policy).
Not all people like to read. Most people prefer a movie instead of a novel. That’s the differentiator between Youtube & any other video-sharing platform and Quora. That’s why video watching platforms are popular and their content has more views.
So these things must happen to get a billion view Quora answer
- Quora must change one view per account policy to one like Youtube’s policy.
and
2. The whole world has to use Quora.
Without these changes, it is highly impossible to have a billion-view answer.
