[hitchhiker999]

That all makes sense, I would disagree on one point:

"topics on Quora are limitless"

The thing (only based on my experience) is that when you grow/diversify too much on a Q&A site, quality tends to dilute, and the audience tends to drop off. I don't know if this is true for Quora; I merely suspect it might be (as it has been for all the others who tried).

In many ways our focus on just one topic has been our saving grace. Many 'globals' try to compete (even S.E.) few manage to top 'specialisation'. Not sure why.

[not_paul_graham]

My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering:

How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement?

How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ?

And is the site profitable?

Thanks.

[hitchhiker999]

Hi not paul,

And is the site profitable?

I started it in 2002. It's part of my full time engagement. It's paid my way since 2006.

There has never been any business model. Adsense only, yes it's profitable - we pay the 3 of us from that - but only because our costs are so low (single server, I've optimised the code to handle itself on an 8 core with 24gb - it runs at about 10% usage, @ about 10 requests a second)

How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number

We knew what Google wanted, we knew what our visitors wanted. We put our visitors first, but made sure the entire site worked in a way that would help Google do its job. (never really SEO). Our design is lacking, we didn't have a designer - we do now (very exciting for us!)

Essentially we predicted for many years what Google would be looking for, did some things ahead of other folks and tried our best to keep the quality of our content high. We also created a very friendly (most of the time) atmosphere on our site and encouraged high-quality posters to stick around - as much as we could. A lot of sites copied us, but missed the concept of keeping the community conducive to friendly interaction. We also did some interesting things to keep out trolls. Like our 'ghost' mode which makes a troll thing they've annoyed everyone, when in actual fact they're being system-level ignored. Fun stuff like that. This reduced further our overhead, and allowed us to expand while not worrying so much about spam. We spent time to build a system that self-managed, and self-grew. That seemed to work.

That's all the old system, what we've created now is far more interesting.