In conversation with Vinay Pandey, Chief Revenue Officer, Quora

Vinay Pandey is the Chief Revenue Officer at Quora. With over 15+ years of experience across sales & marketing, Vinay is a seasoned executive who is passionate about growing revenue and building high-performance teams and aims to take the mission of Quora forward.

Agency Reporter- Since its inception, Quora has been able to grow relatively organically. How has your journey at Quora been till now?

Vinay Pandey- I have been at Quora only for about a year. I joined in May last year and I came from Twitter where I was leading sales and marketing, for the SMB side. One of the things that attracted me to Quora was the high-quality content and the uniqueness of the platform, and the mission that is to grow and share the world’s knowledge. People of Quora are super passionate about the platform and they contribute a whole lot towards that mission. The second reason was obviously a strong team and our founder Adam D’Angelo who is super passionate about this mission. Just interacting with him gave me confidence about the product and its mission. I think we are really married to that mission of growing and sharing the world’s knowledge. Over the last one year, it was just proven to me that the team is absolutely committed to that mission.

We have rolled out a few other products on the subscription side to make sure that the creators are being supported in the right way. Overall it has been a fantastic journey of coming onboard at Quora and interacting not just with consumers but with brands and partners that we work with.

AR- During your tenure, how has Quora’s revenue growth changed?

VP- Over the last year, we have onboarded a large number of brands both on the mid-market side and also on the enterprise side, globally. We have also invested heavily in India, and our Indian sales team has grown quite a bit. We have three offices in India now- Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai. We have also hired for other specialist functions such as agency development, leads, and have made sure that we have such relationships worked out.

We have also grown internationally and now have a strong presence in APAC, pretty strong business in Europe and of course, in the US where we started and continue to see growth.

In the last year, we have rolled out some products which increase transparency, accountability, and reporting capabilities for our advertisers such as third-party integrations with IAS, Google Campaign Manager and we have also done brand lift studies- which is done to ensure that we are super transparent with our partners and it instills more confidence in them about Quora. Apart from that, there’s also a wide variety of small features that we have rolled out and we are also working on some exciting ad formats.

AR- Talking about growth, the changes to Quora’s monetization has definitely opened up a lot of growth opportunities for creators. Could you please shed some light on the strategy behind Quora’s subscription products?

VP- Creators are an integral part of our mission. So far they have been sharing their knowledge over Quora for their love of content and helping us towards our mission. But we also want to make sure that we are able to attract content creators of all types on the platform. People come and create content on the platform for various reasons, and while the majority of them don’t come here for financial motivation, there definitely is a small portion who would love to have a financial motivation. And we want to make sure that when we are rolling out a subscription product, we are able to move that mission forward.

Right now, we have two subscription products. The first is Quora+ through which content creators can keep their content behind a paywall, which can help them attract their own set of audience and get more followers. As users subscribe to their content, the majority of the revenue would go to the creators as per the consumption pattern of the content. It’s a great program where we are able to support creators in a sustainable way.

The second is Quora Space. A space is like a community of users interested in a particular topic or subject and it can be moderated by a creator or group of creators. The creator can set a price for that particular space and we only take a small fee, while the majority of the revenue goes back to the creator.

AR- Have you observed any significant changes in the audience preferences, and content consumption habits in US vs India?

VP- I think the motivation remains the same across geographies. However, there are differences in consumption patterns on the basis of topics and categories. For example in India, Education is a pretty big topic owing to the younger demographic and because the education system is set up quite differently from the US. Other popular topics include sports and politics. Even though we don’t see a lot of differences in the consumption, however, the topics do change depending on the geography.

AR- As a Q&A platform, what sets Quora apart from others and how is it adding value to a marketer’s content strategy?

VP- Quora witnesses 300 million users globally on a monthly basis and India itself witnesses a 100 million users on a monthly basis. As a marketer, one is always looking for the right audience in accordance with the objective of the campaign. The reason people visit Quora is because they are researching and actively looking for answers which helps us put ourselves into a very interesting part of the funnel. We have a high-intent audience and are quite proud of this fact.

Quora is a kind of platform, where brands have an opportunity to insert themselves in conversations and create narratives they want to about their brand, without being inauthentic. The platform is credible, trustworthy and has a human face to all the conversations that are happening and our users like that. The Q&A format in itself leads to high-quality output of content. Our partners are happy with our performance, and with the high-intent audience they are getting and it continues to be our strength.

AR- As the digital ecosystem moves towards a cookieless future, how do you think it will impact Quora?

VP- The cookieless future presents a good opportunity for us in a couple of ways. The first is that we’d be moving away from third-party data to first-party data and Quora is super focused on the privacy of its users as we have our real name policy in place. The other strong point for Quora is the contextual element of the platform. We organize topics into different categories and there’s a natural synergy with advertisers around the topics and interests, which allows them to insert themselves into the conversation around things that our partners are interested in. This enables us to be less reliant on third-party data that perhaps other platforms heavily rely on.

AR- What’s coming up next for Quora?

VP- On the consumer side, Quora is really product-led and our strength is the personalization that focuses on giving users the right content and ensuring that their experience on the platform is always a pleasant one. We are undertaking various experiments around users’ feeds, making sure that our content distribution is in a way that is helpful for the users.

On the ad-product side, we have rolled out a bunch of third-party integrations and we are working with a lot of exciting brand partners. We are also looking at different ad formats and features that are native to how Quora feels, and ensuring that the experience is in a manner that doesn’t hurt the users in any way. We always want to be super mindful of users’ sentiments and keep their experience as our primary focus. There are going to be a lot of rollouts on the ad side that complements our platform’s features.