The intrinsic drive to share knowledge is a powerful motivation, but not everyone can do it pro bono. Earning options on Quora unlock more knowledge than before.
Quora wants to make sharing knowledge more financially sustainable for creators, which will in turn let them share more knowledge with the world.
This is important to our mission, since even though many people are motivated and able to spend their time writing on Quora just to share their knowledge, many others could share much more with financial justification to do so.
In August 2021, Quora launched a monetisation opportunity for creators that would help them make money from the content they create. The way content is created, distributed and monetised has radically changed and Quora wants to empower its users by helping them earn on the content they create.)
As a creator, you have two options to earn:
Publishing posts/answers under Quora+: the creator can create subscriber-only content and earn money based on engagement (read time, etc) from their followers who are subscribed to Quora+. The earning mechanism is similar to Medium, but Quora takes less than Medium, and the earning potential is higher due a larger potential subscriber base.
Offering a Space subscription – Subscription Spaces provide a members-only experience that allows community to form.. The floor is $1/month, and the creator earns around 90% of their subscription fees. Subscribers get special benefits/privileges, for example, getting access to all of the content – both free and paid – in the space and discuss answers with the creator.
How it works
The first is to select content you’ve written for inclusion into a subscription bundle called Quora+. Quora+ subscribers will pay us monthly, they’ll get access to all Quora+ content, and we’ll distribute this revenue to creators in proportion to the amount each subscriber is consuming their content, with more of a subscriber’s contribution going to writers and spaces the subscriber follows. Most Quora+ content will remain freely available to the public, and we’ll explain more how this works below.
The second option is to set up a Space for people to subscribe specifically to your content. A Space can serve as a forum for expert advice, a platform for sharing specialized knowledge, or a place to engage communities of any size with a mix of original and shared content. Creators today are using Spaces to build audiences of millions for their unique insights or audiences of thousands for niche knowledge that can’t be found anywhere else. When you enable subscriptions for a Space, you can choose whatever price you want, and we’ll take a 5% fee. We’re able to sustainably commit to taking only a minimal fee without needing to increase it in the future because we make enough revenue from ads to fund most of the platform’s development and operations. With Space subscriptions, you will be able to choose which content to show to everyone and which to make exclusive to subscribers.
Regardless of which options you choose, our machine learning technology will distribute your content to interested readers out of our 300M monthly unique visitors, helping you reach an audience of millions without having to grow a following or build mailing list from scratch. Our technology will also alleviate the need for creators to decide which content to make freely available to the public and which to limit to subscribers. With their permission, we will predict which content access decisions will balance growing subscriptions with minimizing the amount of cases where content needs to be restricted in order to earn, although creators always retain the ability to make the final decision if they want. As a specific consequence of this technology, most Quora+ content will be freely available to the public.
Space subscriptions will launch today in English for all creators who are residents of these 25 countries and we will expand to more languages and countries over time. We will be inviting an initial group of writers to participate in Quora+ starting today and we will expand that over time as we learn about what works for subscribers and creators. We expect to learn a lot from this launch and will be working hard to adapt based on these learnings, continuing in our goal to make this the best place to write on the internet.
We have always believed that the vast majority of human knowledge is still inaccessible, and we hope these subscription products will empower a new class of creators to share their knowledge online. We are grateful to all the people who have contributed to sharing their knowledge so far, and we expect these new subscription products to be particularly helpful to those who have valuable knowledge to share but who do not have the reputation needed to grow a subscriber base without the distribution provided by a platform like ours.
The subscription feature is live in 25 countries and will be extended to more in the near future.
Quora continues to develop features to make it the best writing experience anywhere, so come join the Quora creators community and help grow the world’s knowledge.