One of Yahoo's greatest success stories over the last year or so has been the phenomenal rise of Yahoo Answers. While the site has always had contextual links, Yahoo has largely not let brand marketers buy into the site... until now that is.
Yahoo Answers now lets advertisers create sponsored questions. The community at first expressed concern. However, in a blog post the team informed Yahoo Answers fan base that in order to continue the site as a free service, they need to take on more advertisers. Most of the 67 comments added to date have been positive.
Yahoo maintains they will clearly label questions from advertisers as paid placements. Further, they are consulting with advertisers to make sure the questions will fit in the community.
New Line Cinema is one of the first to create a sponsored question on the site. They are using Yahoo Answers to market the new Jim Carrey fim, 23. They have posed the following question to the community: "Why does the recurrence of numbers (e.g., 23) and symbols suggest a hidden deeper meaning?"
So far the response has not been mixed. Some 146 people though the question was interesting. Others, like sqshyblujello were not as positive, as you can see below...
This is all a natural move for Yahoo and I expect them to introduce advertisers in a similar fashion into their other communities, e.g. del.icio.us and Flickr. Flickr is already piloting programs.
However, there's a lot of risk here to both Yahoo and the advertisers. Go too far and put in too many ads and the community will complain. Help the advertisers add value and don't overdo the sponsors and everyone wins. I would love to see Yahoo solicit the community's opinion on which advertisers they would like to see engaged. Should all be fun to watch.
