Yahoo! Answers success can be translated into other areas

Google seems to consistently steal the spotlight from competitor Yahoo! these days. At least Yahoo! has a comeuppance every once in a while. Yahoo! Answers appears to be one of the few shining lights these days, as it is the second most popular Internet Q&A site behind Wikipedia.

This is no small matter, as Yahoo! Answers handles 12.3 million monthly visitors -- customers looking for research and answers on probably every imaginable topic. Too bad Yahoo!'s next-generation "Panama" advertising platform is not sitting alongside the Yahoo! Answers website these days -- but it will be shortly.

For perspective, try this on for size: Media sensation YouTube had 13.4 million visitors in June, and during the same period, 947,000 people clicked on Google Answers, down 4 percent from May. Yahoo! Answers, when stacked against these numbers, starts to look pretty impressive from a monthly visitor standpoint, yes?

"Yahoo has been rapidly losing market share in search to Google," says Jim Friedland, senior Internet analyst with Cowen & Co., "so this is a clever way to get people to interact with the site." I agree with this statement -- if you can't beat Google at search, there are other ways to get eyeballs on your web property -- and make money from the interaction. Yahoo! just needs to find more of them.