Exchange4Media: Rediff India has launched rediff questions and answers a me too product of the now famous Yahoo Answers a little over a week ago in beta. Like Yahoo Answers the Rediff’s new website allows users to post questions and answers on the platform, discuss issues, comment on other users and vote for the most relevant answers. The votes then translate into points for the users and the top ten Rediff users are highlighted on the ‘Rediff’s Hall of Fame’. The difference is that in Yahoo Answers the bast answer is picked by the person who asks the question.
One does not need to sign up to ask a question but does need to sign up to answer a question. So you better have a rediffmail account if you want to answer any queries on rediff qna. Sometimes i wonder why they follow the age old barrier of making users compulsorily sign up for their email service? I wish this could change in the future..Also rediff has linked the qna section to get ahead which is an information article section on rediff. By doing so each question has a suggested list of article from get ahead section.
Manish Agarwal, Vice president, Marketing, Rediff.com had the following take on the revenue generation model of QnA, he said “In future, we will have relevant ads placed alongside the content. We will wait till it stabilises before having any ads as it is a golden goose and we don’t want to kill it.”
Manish Agarwal, Vice president, Marketing, Rediff.com had the following take on the revenue generation model of QnA, he said “In future, we will have relevant ads placed alongside the content. We will wait till it stabilises before having any ads as it is a golden goose and we don’t want to kill it.”
The above statement coming from a media company like rediff is heartening! I guess too early or over monetisation of any concept on the internet kills its attractiveness to users, especially when the concept itself revolves around user generated content.
All in all Rediff QnA is a decently executed product but there is nothing path breaking as Yahoo answers has already had a headstart in question and answer domain by recently launching Ask the planet and getting the president of india and many other prominent personalities to ask questions on their platform. I am waiting for the day when India’s largest portal actually launches products that its international competitors i.e. Yahoo and google get inspired from.. Hopefully with more and more indians getting online we see such a path breaking product soon..
