Jeremy Goodrich is the co-founder and Marketing Manager of FunAdvice, one of the oldest question and answer services on the web. He previously worked at Yahoo, and consulted internally on the Yahoo Answers product.

There are already major players offering question and answer services. How do you plan on competing against companies like Yahoo?

Great question and I’m glad you asked. The plan we had in 2003 when we were creating the site was to offer people a way to get advice for their personal life. FunAdvice got started in March of that year, and ran on it’s own largely until September of this year, when Widhadh, the designer & creative person behind the site, created the new look & feel you see now.

After that, the site started taking off & we decided to see if we could grow the site, both on the question / answer side, and on the user side. To compete with sites like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Amazon, our strategy is to effectively offer three pillars of service: search as in internal site search as well as leveraging search engines to drive traffic, community such as friends list, private messaging, profile comments, and content such as the questions & answers themselves, ratings and photos.

Longer term, we’ll also have personalization features and more refinements available on the site, so the browse structure will be personalized in part by user interest, both explicitly and implicitly. What we mean by that is explicit actions, such as giving advice or asking questions will provide some of the food for the recommendation engine, and the reading patterns and click patterns (implicit actions) will also shape what the site begins to recommend you. The integration of these four elements into one unique and powerful experience will help us to carve out a significant market, not to mention the widgets we currently offer that can be used in conjunction with our revenue sharing program that is unique among the Q&A market today.

What did you gain from the time you spent at Yahoo? What did you learn from working with their Answers product?

Yahoo is a great company, and I was thrilled to call myself a Yahoo from April, 2004 to January, 2006. During that time, I was nominated for a SuperStar award and is the highest award that an employee can earn. The GM of Yahoo Personals also handed me an award for helping with their SEO strategy, even though that was not officially what I was tasked to do. My responsibility at Yahoo was search engine optimization consulting for the Search & Marketplace business unit properties, which at that time included Shopping, Travel, Autos, Local, Auctions, Real Estate, and a few smaller, lessor known ones such as Tickets, Pets, and their Classifieds product. When I was hired, I was the first full time SEO manager at the company, and it was a great experience to be able to help drive results on such a massive scale.

One of the many products that launched while I was there was Yahoo Answers, and from my own experience with FunAdvice, and earlier as a moderator at WebmasterWorld.com, I knew a fair bit about building, nurturing, and growing a community. The Answers team was great to work with, and I’m very happy that their product has done so well. The one thing I learned best from what they have done, both while I was at Yahoo and since seeing their product take off is that scale in the Q&A space brings a completely different challenge when it’s measured in millions, instead of thousands. This is why I think personalization is so key to a Q&A service, as Yahoo Answers has such a vast amount of information already, how do you know what slice of it is relevant for you? There’s no way I’m going to read 65 million answers – I don’t need that many. What you need from a Q&A service is the right answer for you. None of the Q&A sites get that perfect today, but I know we’ll come close when our personalization engine goes live later this quarter.

What are some safeguards you take to prevent abuse? Have you found abuse to be a major problem?

There are a few different things we have done to make sure users don’t abuse the service. One of them is content filtering, as there are some words that even in impolite company, people shouldn’t use. And in polite company or especially a community, hateful and hurtful speech can only bring harm, so there are some banned words on the site, and things that get automatically filtered or rejected. Another thing we do is rate limiting, and our team of FunAdvice Advisors, which are analogous to moderators on a regular forum, review questions and answers and report issues to us that need addressing.

Abuse hasn’t been a major issue for us, aside from a few times with web robots. A few times, robots have auto registered and posted spam on the site. The worst incident we had before we put the current safe guards in place ended with more than a dozen user accounts deleted, and about five thousand questions and answers that had to be removed.

From your experience with FunAdvice, what tips in maximizing revenue do you have for a startup company with a similar business model?

I’d recommend anybody who is thinking about creating a forum, community, Q&A site or similar service to make sure that they embrace the “less is more” mantra with regards to ads. From what we’ve seen with our own ad experiments, people who are loyal to your site won’t click ads, so should be shown less of them or none at all. This way, user satisfaction goes up, which then results in more repeat visitors, higher response rates, and better usage metrics overall, which then can drive more traffic and increase ad revenue indirectly, as we’ve seen.

Another thing is ad placement. A lot of sites put ads in the top slot, or at the far left or right column, and these simply won’t get clicked. People are there to read the question, the forum post, the blog post, or listen in to the virtual water cooler, if you will. So, the ad needs to be where the action is, not off to the sidelines, else the revenue per page view, on average, will be significantly lower than a comparable site with the ads place in with the content. There should still be a clear visual separation of ad content versus editorial, however, the ads need to be easily seen & clicked, so they do need to be in the middle of the page, some place.