Total value of Quora is -

As we all know that Quora is a platform where you can give answer or ask questions.

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IMHO, there are three companies which would like to buy Quora (and pay premium price):
1) Microsoft: Microsoft has Bing and has great social integration with facebook in answering questions. So far so good, but still it is not able to put up a strong challenge to Google. Quora would prove a great strategic fit in its portfolio. It has made similar attempts earlier (The Social Search experiment from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs) but has failed.
2) Google: Google is the dominant force in search engine but things are changing rapidly. For example, take my example. Now, I first look out on Quora for my queries for an intelligent, informed and organized opinion. And only if I fail in my attempts, I turn to Google's search. And, I am assuming that so many other fellows would be following a similar approach. Google would not like to loose customer like us because we are the early adopters. Mass population would follow us soon. Secondly, It would be a good fit to Google’s portfolio. I am sure that there are some Google product which are to Quora. But, they have missed the “Social network” boat. Quora, might give them the network they need if they integrate it with G+ and, most importantly, give them sustainable advantage.

Apart from these two, I feel that LinkedIn would be another interested buyer. I am not sure if they have enough money to make such an acquisition. But, it gels well with their business strategy. LinkedIn is a place where the “Best & Brainy” are trying to impress other with their portfolio/resume. Quora can be very good addition to their resume, to know their ability. In fact, this could be a good way for recruiter to short-list candidates.

If, I was CEO of Quora, and money not being the biggest motivation, I would strike partnership with LinkedIn. That way, I can not only leverage the LinkedIn network and increase the “resource” of my company but would also add value to LinkedIn in so many different ways. Certainly, combined entity with LinkedIn would be more valuable than in parts [1+1 = 11]. With Microsoft & Google, Quora might not continue its momentum.

UPDATE 2024: This answer was originally written more than half a decade ago and was accurate and informative at the time. In the intervening years the exponential development of Artificial Intelligence has completely altered the market landscape, rendering much of Quora’s original business model obsolete. On January 9, 2024, Quora announced that while the original Quora business was now profitable, the company has raised an additional $75 million to fund expansion of its POE platform, which aims to be a “universal front end” for AI-based chatbots. This new financing now values the company at $500 million, one quarter of what it was valued at when the question above was written.

Because most users still don’t understand the original model, I am leaving this answer up for educational purposes, as it is still generally accurate for the original, Quora side of the combined business.

Because it is absolutely, positively worth it.

Having watched Quora since its founding from the perspectives of both an active user and an industry professional, I have been blown away by what the company has accomplished, and how it has accomplished it. And the fact that virtually no one has figured out what they are really doing continually amazes me.

The fundamental business model underlying Quora, and why it can provide so much value without any of the participants here paying anything, is the same one that allows readers to pay nothing for The Village Voice, and viewers to pay nothing to watch Jimmy Fallon. In both cases, the entire visible interaction of the operation (subscribers, newsstand readers, editors, reporters, sports columnists and cartoonists; or viewers, hosts, guests, musicians, directors and producers, respectively) are 'outside the monetization loop', which comes 100% from advertisers paying lots of money to run full page ads or 60 second commercials against the content.

In the same way, everything you see on Quora (question askers, answer writers, editors, commenters, administrators, moderators, even Quora members who just lurk and read their feed) is completely 'outside the monetization loop', now and forever.

But what makes Quora so deliciously different (and sends shivers of professional appreciation down my spine whenever I think about it) is that unlike the other two examples, Quora has taken advantage of the functionality of the web to completely disassociate the two loops. Subscribers to the Village Voice see ads, and viewers of Jimmy Fallon see commercials, so they have an idea that somehow, someone is making money. But on Quora, thanks to the magic of the Internet, that is all hidden from you.

Instead, the whole purpose of everything you know and/or experience about Quora is for one—and only one—purpose: it is a giant, organic, machine brilliantly designed by an Architect and constantly being tweaked...

...to output the most frequently visited database on the web: millions of unique pages, each headlined by a query that someone will enter verbatim into a search engine.

And when they do, what happens? The search engine’s billion dollar algorithms crunch through fifty trillion indexed pages, considering the following factors:

Look through that list and think about what Quora has just generated. If you come up with 9/9, you're on the right track. Quora and Google have a marvelously symbiotic relationship: Google needs content to show its viewers, Quora needs viewers to read its content. The result is that for any question you can think to ask Google, Quora’s answer will be on the first page of those 50 trillion where it will be clicked on and viewed…even by someone who never heard of and couldn't care about Quora!

Every one of those page views has value to some advertiser, and in a world of ever-increasing ad tech targeting technology, every page has at a minimum a better-than-average price (because it's a completely vetted page with no objectionable content) and at best the highest price on the web (think about the demographics of a viewer who comes to Quora via a web search for How do I invest in a distressed debt hedge fund or PE firm?). I can attest to this, because my company was one of the initial beta advertisers when Quora turned on ads a few months ago, and we’ve found that Quora has consistently converted higher than any other source of leads. But you know what? Even though I’m on the site daily, and live in and around the keywords and topics on which we are advertising, I have never seen one of our own ads!

As of 2017, Quora has over 200 million monthly unique visitors! Of those, my guess (which Quora will never confirm or deny) is that fewer than 10% are actually registered users of the site. The others are all search engine visitors (and referrals from Quora’s content partners who republish links to ‘best of Quora’ answers, thereby providing additional search engine juice) whom no registered users of Quora ever see, feel or interact with. So even if for some unknown reason all current Quora registered users were to vanish from the earth and never be replaced, that database of crowdsourced answers to eternal questions will live on forever, generating ever-increasing revenues.

It is awe-inspiringly brilliant, and more than worthy of its current $1.8 billion market cap. My only quibble? I’ve been around here contributing priceless content for six years…and no one ever invited me to invest!

Because the world has changed.

And it started with Facebook. And then continued with Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, Tesla, and more.

Before Facebook, investors basically believed a $100 billion+ valuation for an internet / tech company was sort of a “once in a generation” experience. Intel for semiconductors. Microsoft for PC software. Google for the Internet.

Google was viewed as the >one< big winner from “The Internet”. A once-in-a-lifetime type investment — that you might make once in your lifetime. If you were extremely good and lucky.

Look back at The Social Network. “A Billion” seemed like a lot in 2010.

Facebook did almost sell, apparently, to Yahoo! for about one billion.

But then the Facebook IPO changed some investors’ perspective on everything … especially for folks like Founders Fund that had invested in Facebook early.

Not overnight. But once Mobile revenue kicked in at Facebook, everyone realized we had another Google on our hands.

Now, Facebook is worth over $400 billion.

And so some investors, some of the ones really going for it, started to come up with a thesis that every year a $100b+ internet/tech company might be created. Iconiq, Founders Fund, Formation8, and other “new age” funds had a “crazy” thesis at least one $100b+ start-up would be born every year, or at least, once per fund.

And if that was true — investing at $1b or $1.8b would be “cheap”. If you picked right.

Uber and Airbnb took off and approached $100b in valuations in the private markets at least (Founders’ Fund made an amazing investment in Airbnb, no coincidence here). Everyone that thought Airbnb was crazy expensive when it raised at $1b … realized it might be cheap at $10b if it could be worth $100b+. Stripe and Slack showed insane growth could happen in B2B, too. Netflix and Amazon went into massive acceleration mode, especially from a market-cap perspective. AWS became a $100b+ business on its own.

Unicorns went from rare, to common place. There are hundreds of start-ups valued at $1b+ today.

This is radically different from not just the “old days” (Intel was worth < $100m when it IPO’d. Adobe raised less than $10m in its IPO).

It’s even radically different from 2011. Look at the market cap tear Amazon went on since then, to a $400b+ market cap:

The internet did change everything, once again, around 2013. Enough investors began to believe in regular, almost predictable, creation of $100b+ market cap start-ups.

…

So let’s fast-forward to today and Quora.

Is Quora worth $1.8 billion today, with almost no material revenue? Maybe not.

But that’s not the question the new investors are asking. They are asking: does it have a shot at being worth $100 billion+ some day?

Imagine you have a $1b fund/portfolio, carved into 10 $100m checks. You do 10 investments at a $1.8 billion valuation, like Quora, and buy say 5% of each company. And …

• One of these investments ends up IPO’ing and is worth $100b. This returns 5x the fund ($5b / $1b fund). And 20x if it’s really the next Facebook ($400b).
• One of these investments IPO’s and is worth $6b. This returns $200m in profits to the fund. Or maybe a lot more if it’s the next WhatsApp (sold for $20b).
• Two of these investments end up being sold, and the investors get a little more than their money back. Together, they return $100m to the fund.
• Three IPO or are sold, but at less than $1.8b. So the investors lose some money. No material returns.
• Three basically fail. The investors lose most, or maybe even, all their money. Say $300m is lost here (3 $100m bets).

This fund, which does 10 investments at $1.8b valuation per investment, yields $5.3b in gross gains (and $300m in losses) on a $1b fund. Or 5x overall.

>> So the bet is that Quora is one of the 10 companies this year that has a shot at being worth $100b. <<

If that’s right.

It’s a good investment.

Even if today, $1.8b doesn’t totally make sense.

My guess is that Quora is worth approximately $500 million to $575 million, still less than the $1 Billion that someone wishfully established two years ago.

The people who know its true worth are probably the ones who founded and run it, or the people who loan it money or the people who want to buy it. The owners turned down $300 million two or three years ago, (when it was therefore, probably worth $400 million, or much more), so unless something bad happened to the company, or to the industry, or the economy as a whole, it could have increased by at least 10% per year or possibly more than 20% per year subsequently.

There are several methods to use in valuing it, but most of those would use techniques of which I am not familiar, such as what it synergistically offers to another organization wanting to buy it, number of members, and perhaps number in specific geographies and age and income demographies.

One of the less sophisticated methods is the one that you would use to assess the value of a commercial building (capitalized net rents) or a hardware store, (the discounted cash flow). In high tech firms of the modern era, I imagine you do a similar calculation as a reasonableness check, but perhaps using a higher than current revenue figure substituting the amount that it could choose to have if it was to change a major business philosophy (member fees, or selling advertising hits, etc.).

UPDATED!

This Thursday, September 27, 2018, Quora.com’s website value is now at $1 Billion USD.

Alexa Global Rank: 92

Estimated visits per day: 27,032,967 visits / day

Estimated revenue per day: $ 405,493 / day

Estimated worth of website: $ 1,330,000,000 [➽

Footnotes

No, Quora is not worth $30B, as of Nov 2017. Quora raised $85M in April of 2017, reportedly at $1.8B valuation. Its current valuation would be in the range of $2–3B.

Would someone, say Google, pull a trigger and make an acquisition offer, it would likely be in $3–5B range, as that would represent a significant premium to the most recent investment round.

Acquisitions are not science, more like black art, but there are actually rational assumptions underpinning those seemingly crazy offers. Those assumptions revolve around growth, which is the magic elixir that makes thing work in the financial world.

In essence, acquisition offers are guesses about future growth, of revenue as well as other important parameters.

Let us delve into numbers for an estimate of Quora’s valuation potential. According to Wolfram Alpha and Alexa, Quora has about 47 million daily page views, from 26 million daily visits, with bounce rate of 68% and 1.84 pages/visit. Here is a chart of Quora’s relative traffic rank (from Alexa):

The bounce rate is surprisingly high, because of search traffic (~50%) from Google sites where many visitors end up on the site unexpectedly and just leave. Quora has more accurate numbers, but they would probably rather not go into them.

Quora counts multiple views per visit for advertising, so let us assume 100M daily views. Let us further assume 50% advertising load, meaning half of those pages will have ads. Further assuming $5/CPM, we get 100M/day*50%*$5/CPM = $250K/day, or about $90M/year.

Let us go back to the original question of Quora’s potential valuation of $30B. For it to happen, they would need at least $1B/year revenue, still growing fast, something like e.g. Facebook:

Facebook had 500M users in 2010 and generated ~$2B in revenue from (showing ads to) them. They are estimated to generate $40B in revenue for 2017 from 2.07B users.

Note how the growth in the number of users has slowed down a lot, but not the growth of revenue. Facebook is stuffing more and more ads, that are also more expensive, in front of users.

For Quora to be valued at $10B+, they would have to pull the trigger and adopt the same approach, of showing many more ads to users (at least 10X). Were they to do it, they could generate hundreds of millions in revenue even from the current traffic.

A continued growth in the number of users, to hundreds of millions and then over 1B would pull them in a rare league with the likes of Facebook. You can judge for yourself how likely is that to happen.

It is an absolutely fair valuation. You can't look at investing in startups these days like buying equities. You have to look at investing in something like Quora as buying an option on something more fundamental - in this case, the ubiquity of knowledge-based search, and the importance of solving the "content quality" problem that I discuss in my answer to Who is/what companies are solving the hardest problems on the web?

By 2015, the market for online/mobile advertising will likely exceed $100 billion. Matt Cohler essentially purchased a call option on Quora's potential to build a service that captures a non-insignificant portion of this market.

(If I were allowed to invest, I would have been willing to accept an even higher valuation).

Again the question of participant quality (see How will Quora scale and maintain quality with a larger userbase? among others) will be a major factor.

I think it will be hard to widen the user base without a deterioration in quality but to what degree will it deteriorate. I use Aardvark as an example of a service that started out being quite useful and then simply plunged into the abyss of inanity.

The userbase on Quora.com seems to be almost cherry-picked even though registration is open to all. I suspect that could be because its more WoM based exposure and through specialized communities.

An example to the contrary and supporting Quora.com is Wikipedia that, for the most part, has maintained quality and usefulness while being in the top 5 websites in the world last I checked even though it is a non-profit organization (and one of my favorite things overall bar none).

So there you have two opposing examples of possible futures for Quora. I'm not exactly sure what specific individual has driven the UI but s/he must be utterly brilliant.

Is Quora worth $400m? I don't know. It's becoming a very inexact science these days what a company is worth, but Quora is very valuable if you ask me.

Buzz words aside, we really do live in the information age. Google became this giant beast because it was able to organize the world's information in a more natural way than before, then came Wikipedia and organized information even more, but didn't exactly make Google obsolete because it only organized abstract information, it didn't have a human touch to it.

Then came Quora, and while the latter won't necessarily render Google obsolete too, I think it is in fact starting to replace it for some people, at least for certain types of queries. For instance, I'm an Iraqi going to study in the US soon, and naturally I have a LOT of questions about how much does living in Texas (where I'm gonna study) costs, what the weather is like over there, how nice people are, what the best college to attend is, etc. And while Google could certainly provide some of the information I need like the weather forecast, it wouldn't exactly give me first-person insights from people living there now.

That's what Quora excels at, the human touch! Whether you're looking for purely scientific, historical and otherwise abstract information or deep first-person insights about a specific subject in life, Quora does a pretty good job at handing you the right information. That is so very valuable in my book.

It also is worth mentioning that Quora is much different than other QA sites because of its community and the technology/algorithms they use to maintain the "be nice" rule. No matter how smart or stupid your question is, you most certainly are going to get some pretty good answers for it. People rarely try to insult you and when they do, their answers/comments get down-voted in a heartbeat, leaving only the valuable information that you and subsequent visitors of the question need, even if that includes some aggressive arguments about a subject, as long as it's not solely meant to insult anyone, but rather meant for discovering the truth about something, which I find great.

Now regarding the comparison to Instagram that other answers have made, let's all acknowledge that we humans don't really appreciate things the "right" way, because otherwise an education startup would be worth more than not only Instagram, but Facebook itself, and an weapons factory would be worth less than all three! But the fact remains that Instagram is more fun and alluring to people than Quora. And so it is only natural that Instagram is worth more than Quora. After all, it's called supply and demand, not supply and appreciation!

Bottom line, Quora does make the world better, that's value!

According to PitchBook data , Quora is worth $900 million.

As of the end of 2017, Quora is not worth $30 billion - yet. But there is a good chance that it will reach a valuation of $20–30 billion. Why?

LinkedIn: acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion at the end of 2016

• The point of using LinkedIn is to make people think you are awesome (in a job sense), based on your online CV and posts.
• LinkedIn owns its category. It had one real competitor, Xing, which couldn't keep up.
• LinkedIn had around 400 million users when it was acquired.

Quora

• The point of using Quora is to make people think you are awesome (in whatever sense you want), based on your mini CV, credentials, question answers and posts.
• Quora owns its category. It has no real competitors, as Yahoo Answers is moribund and Reddit is not mainstream-friendly enough (and it's not quite the same thing).
• Quora has around 200 million users as of the second half of 2017.

All of these factors are pointing to a similar ball-park valuation for Quora and LinkedIn, given some more years. A risk factor is in the business model - as it stands, nobody will pay to use Quora like they do LinkedIn, so any income will be from ads. However, those increasing user numbers are definitely worth something.

To maximize its valuation, I would advise Quora to lean harder on the social networking features. That would make it more like a general-life LinkedIn, increase site usage time and possibly increase the opportunities to define product levels where some people might pay for special features and access.

Update 2019–06–12

Since I wrote the above post, the following has happened:

1. Quora became much more social-networkey.
2. The Quora Partner Program started, which has been controversial so far.
3. User numbers are around 300 million per month.
4. Quora supposedly raised money in May 2019 at a $2 billion valuation. If true, this was not much of a jump from the previous $1.8 billion valuation.

To make the next jump and become like $30B Twitter, Quora needs to learn more about its users to make its ads more valuable. The social aspect is a step in this direction. In theory, AI mining of its user content should help to increase the price-per-click, but that could be a difficult sell.