Home Interviews Developers Our View Blogs We Like The List
LiveSide - News blog » QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise

Tags

View more

Latest Comments

Featured Article: The Live Search Olympics collection

The 2008 Olympics has been a source of pride for the athletes, for China, and also for Live Search, who posted a very nice series of background images here in the United States, at a rate of about 2 per day.  Even though our friend and ultra Windows Live enthusiast Picturepan2 lives in China (in Shanghai), he still was enamored enough of the Olympics and Live Search to collect every Live Search Olympics background , including the Birds Nest one that ran in China, and gather them in a SkyDrive folder for your viewing enjoyment: He took the time to save the jpg, and not just grab a screenshot
Read the full article...
by Kip Kniskern on 24 Aug 2008, 07:26 PM with 5 comment(s)

QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise

Hitwise Research Director Leann Prescott has posted the first real stats we've seen on question and answer site market share, and although Windows Live QnA is in third place, Yahoo! Answers is far ahead in the race with 96.1% US Market share.

While the blog entry does not detail what this means in terms of actual numbers, it's clear that QnA has a lot of ground to make up.  We'll be watching how these numbers evolve.

Posted Dec 29 2006, 06:30 AM by Kip Kniskern
Filed under: ,

Comments

rhann wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 6:45 AM

beating google, in fact didn;t googles versionb shut down

Harrison Hoffman wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 8:31 AM

Yep, Google Answers shut down pretty recently actually.

kenbw2 wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 10:33 AM

Ususal story: they need to do something new to make it succeed. A good start would be to solve the pointless questions that occur so much on there.

Another thing Y! Answers has over WL QnA is that Y! actually organises the questions into categories. In WL QnA you just have a big jumbled mess of tags that make little sense.

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm not a great fan of user-created tags; you just end up with a mess which noone understands. Best leaving them to one person/team so that there's some control and logic to them.

bf1977 wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 1:13 PM

The Yahoo! Answers is in first place because when some usuary of the Yahoo Mail enters in its email paraece a question and one link of the Yahoo! Answers, in the version in Portuguese of Brazil is thus.

In the same way the Windows Live QnA must make the same, placing links of the services in the entrance of the sites of the Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Spaces, MSN SOApBox, Microsoft and other sites partners.

It is not alone to make this in the version in English, but in all. Despite that I find that the Windows Live QnA alone has in the English language.

Of this form yes it will be able to go for the first position of the Ranked.

brianm76 wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 1:41 PM

Everyday I see something advertising Yahoo! on TV, magazine, newspaper, or web site ad  and I rarely, if  ever see anything Windows Live let alone QnA.  Also, Microsof's product naming has always been sub-par.  This is just another reason why Yahoo! is ahead of the game on with Answers.  In conversation, which sounds better:  Hey, why don't you check out Yahoo! Answers to see if you can get an answer to your questions.  Or:  Hey, why don't you try Windows Live QnA, blah blah blah.  The person is going ask you what the hell is Windows Live QnA.  Until Microsoft can get better at marketing their products, they will always lag behind their competiotrs in these areas.  IMHO.

Chris wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-29-2006 7:26 PM

Brian agreed. I've seen lots of Yahoo Answers advertising here in the UK, almost none for Windows Live. In fact the only WL advertising here has been for search.

And lets not get started on the naming, that is a long and slippery slope leading down to MSN v WL :P

tophtucker wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 12-30-2006 6:06 AM

Accross Windows Live, MS tends to do fine on the tech side but miserably on the marketing side. That's their biggest problem right now, I think. Branding and visibility.

I think using tags instead of categories is fine, but they should list major tags - y'know, Arts, Business, Computers, Education, Entertainment, Food, Games, Home, Politics, Science, Sports, Travel - along the left nav bar at all times. Then they get the best of both worlds. :)

Also, they should reward superstars with Microsoft Points. That'd definitely give them a boost.

BV2312 wrote re: QnA 3rd (but far behind) in US Market Share: Hitwise
on 01-01-2007 11:18 PM

one thing i don't get; why don't they integrate it with windows live alerts! or even window live mail

because once i put up a post and forgot about it then i remembered couple of days later (silly me)

Trackbacks

Powered By Community Server Themed By nb development Feedburner Feeds
Copyright © 2006-2008 LiveSide All Rights Reserved
Microsoft, Microsoft logos, Windows and Windows Live are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.